TY - GEN A1 - Sagnol, Guillaume A1 - Blanco, Marco A1 - Sauvage, Thibaut T1 - Approximation Hierarchies for the cone of flow matrices 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 $1_P 1_P^T \in R^{n\times n}$, where $1_P\in R^n$ is the incidence vector of the $(s,t)$-path $P$. Several combinatorial problems reduce to a linear optimization problem over $K$. This cone is intractable, but 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 a maximum flow problem with pairwise arc-capacities. T3 - ZIB-Report - 18-20 KW - Flows in graphs KW - Approximation hierarchies KW - Copositive programming Y1 - 2018 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-68424 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Harks, Tobias A1 - Heinz, Stefan A1 - Pfetsch, Marc A1 - Vredeveld, Tjark T1 - Online Multicommodity Routing with Time Windows N2 - We consider a multicommodity routing problem, where demands are released \emph{online} and have to be routed in a network during specified time windows. The objective is to minimize a time and load dependent convex cost function of the aggregate arc flow. First, we study the fractional routing variant. We present two online algorithms, called Seq and Seq$^2$. Our first main result states that, for cost functions defined by polynomial price functions with nonnegative coefficients and maximum degree~$d$, the competitive ratio of Seq and Seq$^2$ is at most $(d+1)^{d+1}$, which is tight. We also present lower bounds of $(0.265\,(d+1))^{d+1}$ for any online algorithm. In the case of a network with two nodes and parallel arcs, we prove a lower bound of $(2-\frac{1}{2} \sqrt{3})$ on the competitive ratio for Seq and Seq$^2$, even for affine linear price functions. Furthermore, we study resource augmentation, where the online algorithm has to route less demand than the offline adversary. Second, we consider unsplittable routings. For this setting, we present two online algorithms, called U-Seq and U-Seq$^2$. We prove that for polynomial price functions with nonnegative coefficients and maximum degree~$d$, the competitive ratio of U-Seq and U-Seq$^2$ is bounded by $O{1.77^d\,d^{d+1}}$. We present lower bounds of $(0.5307\,(d+1))^{d+1}$ for any online algorithm and $(d+1)^{d+1}$ for our algorithms. Third, we consider a special case of our framework: online load balancing in the $\ell_p$-norm. For the fractional and unsplittable variant of this problem, we show that our online algorithms are $p$ and $O{p}$ competitive, respectively. Such results where previously known only for scheduling jobs on restricted (un)related parallel machines. T3 - ZIB-Report - 07-22 KW - Online Optimization KW - Routing KW - Telecommunications Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-9654 SN - 1438-0064 ER -