An Efficient Algorithm for the Evacuation Problem in a Certain Class of a Network with Uniform Path-Lengths (Algorithmic Aspects in Information and Management)

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the evacuation problem for a network which consists of a directed graph with capacities and transit times on its arcs. This problem can be solved by the algorithm of Hoppe and Tardos [1] in polynomial time. However their running time is high-order polynomial, and hence is not practical in general. Thus it is necessary to devise a faster algorithm for a tractable and practically useful subclass of this problem. In this paper, we consider a dynamic network with a single sink s such that (i) for each vertex v the sum of transit times of arcs on any path from v to s takes the same value, and (ii) for each vertex v the minimum v-s cut is determined by the arcs incident to s whose tails are reachable from v. We propose an efficient algorithm for this network problem. This class of networks is a generalization of the grid network studied in the paper [2].