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As stated in this paper, there is a technique to reformulate a multi-commodity flow problem (MCF) with undirected edges to its equivalent version with directed edges.

By quoting them:

The reformulation involves adding two additional nodes and four additional arcs for each undirected arc.

However, just from this sentence I can't figure out the shape of the new graph. I also have problem to retrieve the original reference describing in detail such transformation.

Can someone explain how to do this? Also, considering that I am working with a minimisation MCF, is there a more efficient transformation?

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From the reference provided in the paper (exercise on page 689 of the classic book Ahuja et al., 1993). The transformation is just to turn an undirected edge to a directed version. In this case also taking care of capacities and costs. There are many more useful transformations in this book.

For an undirected edge $i$ and $j$, we add two nodes $i'$ and $j'$ and 4 new edges (total of 5 directed edges) with two cycles. Only the edge between $i'$ and $j'$ has a capacity and cost associated with it. The rest have a capacity of $\infty$ and a cost of 0.

It is very clear with a picture:

Ahuja, R., Magnanti, T., & Orlin, J. (1993). Network flows: theory, algorithms, and applications. PrenticeHall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks a lot! It would be great if you may share other maybe better solutions! $\endgroup$ Jun 29, 2022 at 12:27
  • $\begingroup$ Here's a link to the reference. yalma.fime.uanl.mx/~roger/work/teaching/… $\endgroup$ Jun 29, 2022 at 12:30
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    $\begingroup$ Nice that you found a link! This transformation is the appropriate one here. What I meant is that there are other useful ones, see Section 2.4 page 38, depending on what you want to achieve. $\endgroup$ Jun 30, 2022 at 9:03

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