URA Seminar - Nikhil Kumar

Title: Multicommodity Flows and Cuts

Abstract: Flow and cut problems occupy a central place in discrete optimization and algorithms. The well known max-flow min-cut theorem states that there exists a s-t flow of value d in a network if and only if the minimum capacity of edges whose removal separates s and t is at least d. In this talk, we will discuss a generalization of this problem to the multicommodity setting and study natural necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a feasible flow. We will discuss connections to approximation algorithms, metric embeddings and partitions, and survey some of the classical results, open problems and recent progress.