A Matroid Approach to Finding Edge Connectivity and Packing Arborescences

AbstractWe present an algorithm that finds the edge connectivity λ of a graph having n vectices and m edges. The running time is O(λ m log(n2/m)) for directed graphs and slightly less for undirected graphs, O(m+λ2n log(n/λ)). This improves the previous best time bounds, O(min{mn, λ2n2}) for directed graphs and O(λn2) for undirected graphs. We present an algorithm that finds k edge-disjoint arborescences on a directed graph in time O((kn)2). This improves the previous best time bound, O(kmn + k3n2). Unlike previous work, our approach is based on two theorems of Edmonds that link these two problems and show how they can be solved