TY - JOUR A1 - Sagnol, Guillaume A1 - Blanco, Marco A1 - Sauvage, Thibaut T1 - The Cone of Flow Matrices: Approximation Hierarchies and Applications JF - Networks N2 - Let G be a directed acyclic graph with n arcs, a source s and a sink t. We introduce the cone K of flow matrices, which is a polyhedral cone generated by the matrices $\vec{1}_P\vec{1}_P^T\in\RR^{n\times n}$, where $\vec{1}_P\in\RR^n$ is the incidence vector of the (s,t)-path P. We show that several hard flow (or path) optimization problems, that cannot be solved by using the standard arc-representation of a flow, reduce to a linear optimization problem over $\mathcal{K}$. This cone is intractable: we prove that the membership problem associated to $\mathcal{K}$ is NP-complete. However, the affine hull of this cone admits a nice description, and we give an algorithm which computes in polynomial-time the decomposition of a matrix $X\in \operatorname{span} \mathcal{K}$ as a linear combination of some $\vec{1}_P\vec{1}_P^T$'s. Then, we provide two convergent approximation hierarchies, one of them based on a completely positive representation of~K. We illustrate this approach by computing bounds for the quadratic shortest path problem, as well as a maximum flow problem with pairwise arc-capacities. Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1002/net.21820 VL - 72 IS - 1 SP - 128 EP - 150 ER -