  We consider entanglement swapping schemes with general (rather than
maximally) entangled bipartite states of arbitary dimension shared pairwise
between three or more parties in a chain. The intermediate parties perform
generalised Bell measurements with the result that the two end parties end up
sharing a entangled state which can be converted into maximally entangled
states. We obtain an expression for the average amount of maximal entanglement
concentrated in such a scheme and show that in a certain reasonably broad class
of cases this scheme is provably optimal and that, in these cases, the amount
of entanglement concentrated between the two ends is equal to that which could
be concentrated from the weakest link in the chain.
