Given a network with capacities and transit times on the arcs, the quickest flow problem asks for a ‘flow over time’ that
satisfies given demands within minimal time. In the setting of flows over time, flow on arcs may vary over time and the transit
time of an arc is the time it takes for flow to travel through this arc. In most real-world applications (such as, e.g., road
traffic, communication networks, production systems, etc.), transit times are not fixed but depend on the current flow situation
in the network. We consider the model where the transit time of an arc is given as a nondecreasing function of the rate of
inflow into the arc. We prove that the quickest s-t-flow problem is NP-hard in this setting and give various approximation results, including an FPTAS for the quickest multicommodity
flow problem with bounded cost.
Extended abstract; information on the full version of the paper can be obtained via the authors’ WWW-pages. This work was
supported in part by the joint Berlin/Zurich graduate program Combinatorics, Geometry, and Computation (CGC) financed by ETH
Zurich and the German Science Foundation grant GRK 588/2 and by the EU Thematic Network APPOL II, Approximation and Online
Algorithms, IST-2001-30012.