Flows in Temporal networks

We introduce temporal flows on temporal networks, i.e., networks the links of which exist only at certain moments of time. Temporal networks were defined by Kempe et al. STOC'00 (see also Mertzios et al. ICALP'13). Our flow model is new and differs substantially from the "Flows over time" model, also called "dynamic flows" in the literature. We show that the problem of finding the maximum amount of flow that can pass from a source vertex s to a sink vertex t up to a given time is solvable in Polynomial time, even when node buffers are bounded. We then examine mainly the case of unbounded node buffers. We provide a (simplified) static Time-Extended network, which is of polynomial size to the input and whose static flow rates are equivalent to the respective temporal flow of the temporal network; via that, we prove that the maximum temporal flow is equal to the minimum temporal s-t cut. We further show that temporal flows can always be decomposed into flows, each of which is "pushed" only through a journey, i.e., a directed path whose successive edges have strictly increasing moments of existence. Using the latter, we provide linear expected time algorithms for the maximum s-t temporal flow problem in networks of bounded node degrees with uniform, random, unique availabilities of edges. We then consider mixed temporal networks, which have some edges with specified availabilities and some edges with random availabilities; we show that it is #P-complete to compute the tails and expectations of the maximum temporal flow (which is now a random variable) in a mixed temporal network. Finally, we examine a Ford-Fulkerson inspired algorithm for maximum temporal flow in networks with a single availability for every edge and show that it computes the maximum temporal flow, i.e., there is an extension of the traditional algorithm for our model.