Pareto Sums of Pareto Sets

In bi-criteria optimization problems, the goal is typically to compute the set of Pareto-optimal solutions. Many algorithms for these types of problems rely on efficient merging or combining of partial solutions and filtering of dominated solutions in the resulting sets. In this paper, we consider the task of computing the Pareto sum of two given Pareto sets A, B of size n. The Pareto sum contains all non-dominated points of the Minkowski sum M = {a+b|a ∈ A, b ∈ B}. Since the Minkowski sum has a size of n², but the Pareto sum C can be much smaller, the goal is to compute C without having to compute and store all of M. We present several new algorithms for efficient Pareto sum computation, including an output-sensitive one with a running time of 𝒪(n log n + nk) and a space consumption of 𝒪(n+k) for k = |C|. We also describe suitable engineering techniques to improve the practical running times of our algorithms and provide a comparative experimental study. As one showcase application, we consider preprocessing-based methods for bi-criteria route planning in road networks. Pareto sum computation is a frequent task in the preprocessing phase. We show that using our algorithms with an output-sensitive space consumption allows to tackle larger instances and reduces the preprocessing time compared to algorithms that fully store M.