Maximum flow using Ford-Fulkerson and DFS

This question is about the time complexity of the Ford-Fulkerson maximum flow algorithm when using DFS to find augmenting paths.

There is a well-known example showing that using DFS one can need a linear number of iterations in the maximum flow, see for instance the Wikipedia page linked to above.

However, I'm not really convinced by this example: a standard DFS implementation would not exhibit the behaviour of alternating between B and C as first node of the path (using the vertex names from the Wikipedia page).

So, let us impose the very natural condition that whenever the DFS visits a node $u$, it always examines the neighbors of $u$ in the same order. Are there still examples for which FF with DFS uses a large number of iterations?

As a variant, suppose that we have the additional property that the different orderings of neighbors are consistent with some arbitrary but fixed global ordering of the vertices. Does that make a difference?

This seems to me like a pretty basic question; I apologize in advance if the answer is well-known but I am not an expert on flows and some googling did not turn up anything.

Edit: The answer turns out to be yes, there are still examples. See Figure 2 of this paper. In these examples FF with DFS take an exponential (in the number of vertices) number of iterations. It seems easy to prove that this is tight, i.e., that the number of iterations are always bounded by $2^{O(n)}$ (regardless of the values of the capacities).

• I have wondered about the same question. – Luca Trevisan Feb 24 '11 at 1:45
• (1) Nice question. (2) I think that the bad-case example (like the one in Wikipedia) is usually introduced as a reason why some consideration about visiting order is necessary, not as a reason against using depth-first search. – Tsuyoshi Ito Feb 24 '11 at 14:57
• I don't think I can now teach FF without an answer to this question. Nice !! – Suresh Venkat Feb 24 '11 at 16:52
• Isn't finding the maximum flow in a minimal number of iterations NP-Complete? – user834 Feb 24 '11 at 19:20

1 Answer

If adjacency lists are fixed in advance then DFS always terminates (even if there are irrational capacities).

• Thanks. That does not in itself answer my question, however, the example given in Figure 2 of the Dean-Goemans-Immorlica paper shows a recursive construction based on the standard example, which does answer my question and shows that FF with DFS can require exponentially many iterations. – Per Austrin Feb 24 '11 at 19:20