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The RELAX-IV minimum cost flow solver implementation in FORTRAN by Dimitri P. Bertsekas and Paul Tseng is made accessible inside R.

# Interface

There are two functions for interfacing with the RELAX-IV solver. The first, RELAX_IV(), is intended for most users and includes a simplified interface and input sanitization. It’s inputs are characteristics of the graph, and it returns the flow across each edges.

For advanced usage, consider the .RELAX_IV() function. This features no input sanitization and has a more complex interface. It’s inputs are advanced characteristics of the graph, and it returns a more complete set of results.

# RELAX-IV algorithm and code

The rrelaxiv package implements D. P. Bertsekas and P. Tseng’s RELAX-IV algorithm and code:

• Bersekas, D. P. and Tseng, P., “Relaxation Methods for Minimum Cost …” Operations Research, vol. 26, 1988, 93-114
• Bertsekas, D. P., “An Auction/Sequential Shortest Path Algorithm for the Minimum Cost Flow Problem”, LIDS Report P-2146, MIT, Nov. 1992
• Bertsekas, D.P., Linear Network Optimization, MIT Press, 1991
• Bertsekas, D.P., Network Optimization: Continuous and Discrete Models, Athena Scientific, 1998; http://web.mit.edu/dimitrib/www/noc.htm

Bertsekas and Tseng freely permit their software to be used for research purposes, but non-research uses, including the use of it to ‘satisfy in any part commercial delivery requirements to government or industry,’ require a special agreement with them. By extension, this requirement applies to most any use of R functions in the rrelaxiv package.

To request permissions not here relayed, contact Professor Bertsekas at Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA 02139 (617) 253-7267

# Installing

This package is unlikely to ever appear on CRAN. Methods to install are below.

## Using drat

The drat package can be used to install the package. On Windows/Mac systems this should install a binary version, meaning FORTRAN is not required to be set up on your system. On *nix based systems, it will only install from source and therefore requires gfortran installed.

The following command will add this repo to your list of sources, so that it interacts with install.packages and update.packages.

drat::addRepo("rrelaxiv", "https://errickson.net/rrelaxiv")
install.packages("rrelaxiv")

Unfortunately the drat::addRepo needs to be run each time you plan on installing or updating. You may be better served adding the drat::addRepo line to your .Rprofile.

See this wiki page for details of support for drat on various systems.

## Using devtools

Installing using devtools will build the package from source directly from this repo. You can either build the most recent release with

devtools::install_github("josherrickson/rrelaxiv@*release")

or the current development version at to the last commit to this repo with

devtools::install_github("josherrickson/rrelaxiv")

Building from source requires gfortran.

## Manual Installation

Binaries can also be installed manually without the use of external packages. You can download binary releases from this directory in the repository, or here to build from source (note that building from source requires gfortran).

After downloading, install with

install.packages("/path/to/downloaded/file.xyz", repos = NULL)

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