Nonlinear Networks

Although Quesnay in 1758 conceptualized the financial flows in an economy as a network, the formal study of network flow problems dates to Kantorovich (1939), with the first applications being drawn from production and transportation/logistics problems (see also Hitchcock (1941) and Koopmans (1947)). Interestingly, such studies even preceded the development of linear programming with the work of Dantzig (1948) on the simplex method. The first network models were linear in that the costs on the links were assumed to be linear functions of the flows on the links.