A Strongly Polynomial Algorithm for Generalized Flow Maximization

Source abstract

A strongly polynomial algorithm is given for the generalized flow maximization problem. It uses a new variant of the scaling technique called continuous scaling. The main measure of progress is that within a strongly polynomial number of steps, an arc can be identified that must be tight in every dual optimal solution and thus can be contracted. As a consequence of the result, we also obtain a strongly polynomial algorithm for the linear feasibility problem with at most two nonzero entries per column in the constraint matrix.