Quadratic cost flow and the conjugate gradient method

By introducing quadratic penalty terms, a convex nonseparable quadratic network program can be reduced to an unconstrained optimization problem whose objective function is a piecewise quadratic and continuously differentiable function. A conjugate gradient method is applied to the reduced problem and its convergence is proved. The computation exploits the special network data structures originated from the network simplex method. This algorithmic framework allows direct extension to multicommodity cost flows. Some preliminary computational results are presented.