Dinic's algorithm or Dinitz's algorithm is a strongly polynomial algorithm for computing the maximum flow in a flow network, conceived in 1970 by Israeli (formerly Soviet) computer scientist Yefim Dinitz. The algorithm runs in ${\displaystyle O(|V|^{2}|E|)}$ time and is similar to the Edmonds–Karp algorithm, which runs in ${\displaystyle O(|V||E|^{2})}$ time, in that it uses shortest augmenting paths. The introduction of the concepts of the level graph and blocking flow enable Dinic's algorithm to achieve its performance.

Dinitz invented the algorithm in January 1969, as a master's student in Georgy Adelson-Velsky's group. A few decades later, he would recall:

In Adel'son-Vel'sky's Algorithms class, the lecturer had a habit of giving the problem to be discussed at the next meeting as an exercise to students. The DA was invented in response to such an exercise. At that time, the author was not aware of the basic facts regarding [the Ford–Fulkerson algorithm]….

⋮ Ignorance sometimes has its merits. Very probably, DA would not have been invented then, if the idea of possible saturated edge desaturation had been known to the author.

In 1970, Dinitz published a description of the algorithm in Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR. In 1974, Shimon Even and (his then Ph.D. student) Alon Itai at the Technion in Haifa were very curious and intrigued by Dinitz's algorithm as well as Alexander V. Karzanov's related idea of blocking flow. However it was hard for them to decipher these two papers, each being limited to four pages to meet the restrictions of journal Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR. Even did not give up, and after three days of effort managed to understand both papers except for the layered network maintenance issue. Over the next couple of years, Even gave lectures on "Dinic's algorithm", mispronouncing the name of the author while popularizing it. Even and Itai also contributed to this algorithm by combining BFS and DFS, which is how the algorithm is now commonly presented.

For about 10 years of time after the Ford–Fulkerson algorithm was invented, it was unknown if it could be made to terminate in polynomial time in the general case of irrational edge capacities. This caused a lack of any known polynomial-time algorithm to solve the max flow problem in generic cases. Dinitz's algorithm and the Edmonds–Karp algorithm (published in 1972) both independently showed that in the Ford–Fulkerson algorithm, if each augmenting path is the shortest one, then the length of the augmenting paths is non-decreasing and the algorithm always terminates.

Let ${\displaystyle G=((V,E),c,f,s,t)}$ be a network with ${\displaystyle c(u,v)}$ and ${\displaystyle f(u,v)}$ the capacity and the flow of the edge ${\displaystyle (u,v)}$, respectively.

Dinic's Algorithm