Advances in Solving the Multicommodity-Flow Problem

Richard D. McBride
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Richard D. McBride: Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089-1421

Interfaces, 1998, vol. 28, issue 2, 32-41

Abstract: The multicommodity-flow problem arises in a wide variety of important applications. Many communications, logistics, manufacturing, and transportation problems can be formulated as large multicommodity-flow problems. During the last few years researchers have made steady advances in solving extremely large multicommodity-flow problems. This improvement has been due both to algorithmic and to hardware advances. At present the primal simplex method using the basis-partitioning approach gives excellent solution times even on modest hardware. These results imply that we can now efficiently solve the extremely large multicommodity-flow models found in industry. The extreme-point solution can also be quickly reoptimized to meet the additional requirements often imposed upon the continuous solution. Currently practitioners are using EMNET, a primal basis-partitioning algorithm, to solve extremely large logistics problems with more than 600,000 constraints and 7,000,000 variables in the food industry.

Keywords: network/graphs; multicommodity; transportation; freight/materials handling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orinte:v:28:y:1998:i:2:p:32-41

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