Practical Fully Dynamic Minimum Cut Algorithms

Abstract: We present a practically efficient algorithm for maintaining a global minimum cut in large dynamic graphs under both edge insertions and deletions. While there has been theoretical work on this problem, our algorithm is the first implementation of a fully-dynamic algorithm. The algorithm uses the theoretical foundation and combines it with efficient and finely-tuned implementations to give an algorithm that can maintain the global minimum cut of a graph with rapid update times. We show that our algorithm gives up to multiple orders of magnitude speedup compared to static approaches both on edge insertions and deletions.