High-Accuracy Multicommodity Flows via Iterative Refinement

Abstract: The multicommodity flow problem is a classic problem in network flow and combinatorial optimization, with applications in transportation, communication, logistics, and supply chain management, etc. Existing algorithms often focus on low-accuracy approximate solutions, while high-accuracy algorithms typically rely on general linear program solvers. In this paper, we present efficient high-accuracy algorithms for a broad family of multicommodity flow problems on undirected graphs, demonstrating improved running times compared to general linear program solvers. Our main result shows that we can solve the $\ell_{q, p}$-norm multicommodity flow problem to a $(1 + \varepsilon)$ approximation in time $$O_{q, p}(m^{1+o(1)} k² \log(1 / \varepsilon))$$, where $k$ is the number of commodities, and $O_{q, p}(\cdot)$ hides constants depending only on $q$ or $p$. As $q$ and $p$ approach to $1$ and infinity respectively, $\ell_{q, p}$-norm flow tends to maximum concurrent flow. We introduce the first iterative refinement framework for $\ell_{q, p}$-norm minimization problems, which reduces the problem to solving a series of decomposable residual problems. In the case of $k$-commodity flow, each residual problem can be decomposed into $k$ single commodity convex flow problems, each of which can be solved in almost-linear time. As many classical variants of multicommodity flows were shown to be complete for linear programs in the high-accuracy regime [Ding-Kyng-Zhang, ICALP'22], our result provides new directions for studying more efficient high-accuracy multicommodity flow algorithms.