Algorithms for Finding Maximum Matchings in Bipartite Graphs

In this paper we survey algorithms for finding the maximum cardinality and the maximum weight matching in a bipartite graph. We discuss the complexity of various algorithms for these problems, with an emphasis on algorithms for sparse graphs. We provide a detailed tutorial description of implementations of some promising algorithms, suggest improvements, and provide an experimental comparison of our code with other well-known codes on large sparse matrices. The improvements that we suggest significantly reduce the execution time of the original algorithm for finding the maximum weight matching in sparse bipartite graphs with the best-known strongly polynomial worst-case time complexity.

By: Anshul Gupta, Lexing Ying (NYU)

Published in: RC21576 in 1999

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