A POLYNOMIAL TIME ALGORITHM TO DETERMINE MAXIMAL BALANCED EQUIVALENCE RELATIONS

Following Golubitsky, Stewart, and others, we give definitions of networks and input trees. In order to make our work as general as possible, we work with a somewhat extended notion of multiplicity, and introduce the concept of "bunching" of trees. We then define balanced equivalence relations on networks, and a partial ordering on these relations. Previous work has shown that there is a maximal balanced equivalence relation on networks of certain classes: we provide a different style of proof which gives this result for any network. We define two algorithms to determine this relation in practice on a given finite network — one for use with networks with all multiplicities equal, and a second for the more general case. We then provide illustrative examples of each algorithm in use. We show both of these algorithms to be quartic in the size of the given network.