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From Theory to Practice: Engineering Approximation Algorithms for Dynamic Orientation

Authors Ernestine Grossmann , Henrik Reinstädtler , Eva Rotenberg , Christian Schulz , Ivor van der Hoog , Juliette Vlieghe

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  • Theory of computation → Dynamic graph algorithms
Keywords
  • Dynamic graphs
  • out-orientation

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Abstract

Dynamic graph algorithms have seen significant theoretical advancements, but practical evaluations often lag behind. This work bridges the gap between theory and practice by engineering and empirically evaluating recently developed approximation algorithms for dynamically maintaining graph orientations. We comprehensively describe the underlying data structures, including efficient bucketing techniques and round-robin updates. Our implementation has a natural parameter λ, which allows for a trade-off between algorithmic efficiency and the quality of the solution. In the extensive experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that our implementation offers a considerable speedup. Using different quality metrics, we show that our implementations are very competitive and can outperform previous methods. Overall, our approach solves more instances than other methods while being up to 112 times faster on instances that are solvable by all methods compared.

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Ernestine Grossmann, Henrik Reinstädtler, Eva Rotenberg, Christian Schulz, Ivor van der Hoog, and Juliette Vlieghe. From Theory to Practice: Engineering Approximation Algorithms for Dynamic Orientation. In 33rd Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 351, pp. 65:1-65:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2025.65

Author Details

Ernestine Grossmann
  • Heidelberg University, Germany
Henrik Reinstädtler
  • Heidelberg University, Germany
Eva Rotenberg
  • IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Christian Schulz
  • Heidelberg University, Germany
Ivor van der Hoog
  • IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Juliette Vlieghe
  • IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Funding

Ivor van der Hoog, Eva Rotenberg, and Juliette Vlieghe are grateful to the VILLUM Foundation for supporting this research via Eva Rotenberg’s Young Investigator grant (VIL37507) "Efficient Recomputations for Changeful Problems". Part of this work took place while these authors were affiliated with the Technical University of Denmark. Ernestine Grossmann, Henrik Renstädtler, and Christian Schulz acknowledge support by DFG grant SCHU 2567/8-1.
  • van der Hoog, Ivor: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 899987.

Supplementary Materials

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