Lattice-Valued Bottleneck Duality

Abstract

This note reformulates certain classical combinatorial duality theorems in the context of order lattices. For source-target networks, we generalize bottleneck path-cut and flow-cut duality results to edges with capacities in a distributive lattice. For posets, we generalize a bottleneck version of Dilworth's theorem, again weighted in a distributive lattice. These results are applicable to a wide array of non-numerical network flow problems, as shown. All results, proofs, and applications were created in collaboration with AI language models. An appendix documents their role and impact.