Stable flows with restricted edges

Stable flows generalize the well-known concept of stable matchings to markets in which transactions may involve several agents, forwarding flow from one to another. An instance of the problem consists of a capacitated directed network, in which vertices express their preferences over their incident edges. A network flow is stable if there is no group of vertices that all could benefit from rerouting the flow along a walk. Fleiner [13] established that a stable flow always exists by reducing it to the stable allocation problem. We present an augmenting-path algorithm for computing a stable flow, the first algorithm that achieves polynomial running time for this problem without using stable allocation as a blackbox subroutine. We further consider the problem of finding a stable flow such that the flow value on every edge is within a given interval. For this problem, we present an elegant graph transformation and based on this, we devise a simple and fast algorithm, which also can be used to find a solution to the stable marriage problem with forced and forbidden edges. Finally, we study the stable multicommodity flow model introduced by Király and Pap [24]. The original model is highly involved and allows for commodity-dependent preference lists at the vertices and commodityspecific edge capacities. We present several graph-based reductions that show equivalence to a significantly simpler model. We further show that it is NP-complete to decide whether an integral solution exists.