Maximum Bipartite Matching is a fundamental problem in graph theory that aims to find the largest possible matching in a bipartite graph. A bipartite graph consists of two distinct sets of vertices, say and , such that every edge connects a vertex in to a vertex in . A matching is a set of edges that does not have any shared vertices, and the goal is to maximize the number of edges in this matching. The maximum matching is the matching that contains the largest number of edges possible.
To solve this problem, algorithms such as the Hopcroft-Karp algorithm can be utilized, which operates in time complexity, where is the number of edges and is the number of vertices in the graph. Applications of maximum bipartite matching can be seen in various fields such as job assignments, network flows, and resource allocation problems, making it a crucial concept in both theoretical and practical contexts.
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