Walking Through Waypoints

Walking Through Waypoints

Abstract

We initiate the study of a fundamental combinatorial problem: Given a capacitated graph G=(V,E), find a shortest walk ("route") from a source s in V to a destination t in V that includes all vertices specified by a subset W of V: the waypoints. This waypoint routing problem finds immediate applications in the context of modern computer networked distributed systems. Our main contribution is an exact polynomial-time algorithm for graphs of bounded treewidth. We also show that if the number of waypoints is logarithmically bounded, exact polynomial-time algorithms exist even for general graphs. Our two algorithms provide an almost complete characterization of what can be solved exactly in polynomial-time: we show that more general problems (i.e., on grid graphs of maximum degree 3 and with slightly more waypoints) are computationally intractable.

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Authors
  • Akhoondian Amiri, Saeed
  • Foerster, Klaus-Tycho
  • Schmid, Stefan
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Supplemental Material
Shortfacts
Category
Paper in Conference Proceedings or in Workshop Proceedings (Paper)
Event Title
13th International Symposium on Latin American Theoretical Informatics (LATIN 2018)
Divisions
Communication Technologies
Subjects
Angewandte Informatik
Theoretische Informatik
Event Location
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Event Type
Conference
Event Dates
16-19 Apr 2018
Date
April 2018
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