Faster and More Dynamic Maximum Flow by Incremental Breadth-First Search

Abstract

We introduce the Excesses Incremental Breadth-First Search (Excesses IBFS) algorithm for maximum flow problems. We show that Excesses IBFS has the best overall practical performance on real-world instances, while maintaining the same polynomial running time guarantee of O(mn2) as IBFS, which it generalizes. Some applications, such as video object segmentation, require solving a series of maximum flow problems, each only slightly different than the previous. Excesses IBFS naturally extends to this dynamic setting and is competitive in practice with other dynamic methods.