Models for the piecewise linear unsplittable multicommodity flow problems

International audienceIn this paper, we consider multicommodity flow problems, with unsplit-table flows and piecewise linear routing costs. We first focus on the case where the piecewise linear routing costs are convex. We show that this problem is N P-hard for the general case, but polynomially solvable when there is only one commodity. We then propose a strengthened mixed-integer programming formulation for the problem. We show that the linear relaxation of this formulation always gives the optimal solution of the problem for the single commodity case. We present a wide array of computational experiments, showing this formulation also produces very tight linear programming bounds for the multi-commodity case. Finally, we also adapt our formulation for the non-convex case. Our experimental results imply that the linear programming bounds for this case, are only slightly than the ones of state-of-the-art models for the splittable flow version of the problem