Spanning Distribution Trees of Graphs

Let G be a graph with a single source w, assigned a positive integer called the supply. Every vertex other than w is a sink, assigned a nonnegative integer called the demand. Every edge is assigned a positive integer called the capacity. Then a spanning tree T of G is called a spanning distribution tree if the capacity constraint holds when, for every sink v, an amount of flow, equal to the demand of v, is sent from w to v along the path in T between them. The spanning distribution tree problem asks whether a given graph has a spanning distribution tree or not. In the paper, we first observe that the problem is NP-complete even for series-parallel graphs, and then give a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm to solve the problem for a given series-parallel graph G. The computation time is bounded by a polynomial in n and D, where n is the number of vertices in G and D is the sum of all demands in G.