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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2025.31

An Optimal Algorithm for Shortest Paths in Unweighted Disk Graphs

Authors: Bruce W. Brewer and Haitao Wang

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 351, 33rd Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2025)

Abstract

Given in the plane a set S of n points and a set of disks centered at these points, the disk graph G(S) induced by these disks has vertex set S and an edge between two vertices if their disks intersect. Note that the disks may have different radii. We consider the problem of computing shortest paths from a source point s ∈ S to all vertices in G(S) where the length of a path in G(S) is defined as the number of edges in the path. The previously best algorithm solves the problem in O(nlog² n) time. A lower bound of Ω(nlog n) is also known for this problem under the algebraic decision tree model. In this paper, we present an O(nlog n) time algorithm, which matches the lower bound and thus is optimal. Another virtue of our algorithm is that it is quite simple.

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Bruce W. Brewer and Haitao Wang. An Optimal Algorithm for Shortest Paths in Unweighted Disk Graphs. In 33rd Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 351, pp. 31:1-31:8, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{brewer_et_al:LIPIcs.ESA.2025.31,
  author =	{Brewer, Bruce W. and Wang, Haitao},
  title =	{{An Optimal Algorithm for Shortest Paths in Unweighted Disk Graphs}},
  booktitle =	{33rd Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2025)},
  pages =	{31:1--31:8},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-395-9},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{351},
  editor =	{Benoit, Anne and Kaplan, Haim and Wild, Sebastian and Herman, Grzegorz},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2025.31},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-244997},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2025.31},
  annote =	{Keywords: disk graphs, weighted Voronoi diagrams, shortest paths}
}

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An Optimal Algorithm for Shortest Paths in Unweighted Disk Graphs

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