Novel Approach for Solving a Variant of Equal Flow Problem
This addresses a common problem in inventory management systems, but the approach appears incremental as it adapts known methods to a specific variant.
The authors tackled a subclass of the NP-hard Integer Equal Flow problem, which lacks direct solutions, by proposing a local minima solution that projects convex spaces to transform it into a linear integer programming or constraint satisfaction problem, enabling effective solution with standard optimization strategies like simplex.
In this article we consider a certain sub class of Integer Equal Flow problem, which are known NP hard [8]. Currently there exist no direct solutions for the same. It is a common problem in various inventory management systems. Here we discuss a local minima solution which uses projection of the convex spaces to resolve the equal flows and turn the problem into a known linear integer programming or constraint satisfaction problem which have reasonable known solutions and can be effectively solved using simplex or other standard optimization strategies.