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Determining Fixed-Length Paths in Directed and Undirected Edge-Weighted Graphs

Authors Daniel Hambly , Rhyd Lewis , Padraig Corcoran

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Author Details

Daniel Hambly
  • School of Mathematics, Cardiff University, Wales, UK
Rhyd Lewis
  • School of Mathematics, Cardiff University, Wales, UK
Padraig Corcoran
  • School of Computer Science and Informatics, Cardiff University, Wales, UK

Funding

  • Hambly, Daniel: EPSRC

Cite AsGet BibTex

Daniel Hambly, Rhyd Lewis, and Padraig Corcoran. Determining Fixed-Length Paths in Directed and Undirected Edge-Weighted Graphs. In 22nd International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms (SEA 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 301, pp. 15:1-15:11, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.SEA.2024.15

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the NP-hard problem of identifying fixed-length s-t paths in edge-weighted graphs - that is, a path of a desired length k from a source vertex s to a target vertex t. Many existing strategies look at paths whose lengths are determined by the number of edges in the path. We, however, look at the length of the path as the sum of the edge weights. Here, three exact algorithms for this problem are proposed: the first based on an integer programming (IP) formulation, the second a backtracking algorithm, and the third based on an extension of Yen’s algorithm. Analysis of these algorithms on random graphs shows that the backtracking algorithm performs best on smaller values of k, whilst the IP is preferable for larger values of k.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Backtracking
  • Theory of computation → Integer programming
  • Information systems → Fixed length attributes
Keywords
  • Graphs
  • paths
  • backtracking
  • integer programming
  • Yen’s algorithm

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