Space and Time Trade-Off for the k Shortest Simple Paths Problem

Abstract

The k shortest simple path problem (kSSP) asks to compute a set of top-k shortest simple paths from a vertex s to a vertex t in a digraph. Yen (1971) proposed the first algorithm with the best known theoretical complexity of O(kn(m+n log n)) for a digraph with n vertices and m arcs. Since then, the problem has been widely studied from an algorithm engineering perspective, and impressive improvements have been achieved. 
In particular, Kurz and Mutzel (2016) proposed a sidetracks-based (SB) algorithm which is currently the fastest solution. In this work, we propose two improvements of this algorithm.
We first show how to speed up the SB algorithm using dynamic updates of shortest path trees. We did experiments on some road networks of the 9th DIMAC'S challenge with up to about half a million nodes and one million arcs. Our computational results show an average speed up by a factor of 1.5 to 2 with a similar working memory consumption as SB. We then propose a second algorithm enabling to significantly reduce the working memory at the cost of an increase of the running time (up to two times slower). Our experiments on the same data set show, on average, a reduction by a factor of 1.5 to 2 of the working memory.