Directed Graph Exploration

Directed Graph Exploration

Abstract

We study the problem of exploring all nodes of an unknown directed graph. A searcher has to construct a tour that visits all nodes, but only has information about the parts of the graph it already visited. The goal is to minimize the cost of such a tour. In this paper, we present upper and lower bounds for both the deterministic and the randomized online version of exploring all nodes of directed graphs. Our bounds are sharp or sharp up to a small constant, depending on the specific model. Essentially, exploring a directed graph has a multiplicative overhead linear in the number of nodes. If one wants to search for just a node in unweighted directed graphs, a greedy algorithm with quadratic multiplicative overhead can only be improved by a factor of at most two. We were also able to show that randomly choosing a starting point does not improve lower bounds beyond a small constant factor.

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Authors
  • Foerster, Klaus-Tycho
  • Wattenhofer, Roger
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Supplemental Material
Shortfacts
Category
Paper in Conference Proceedings or in Workshop Proceedings (Paper)
Event Title
16th International Conference On Principles Of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2012)
Divisions
Communication Technologies
Subjects
Theoretische Informatik
Event Location
Rome, Italy
Event Type
Conference
Event Dates
17-20 Dec 2012
Date
December 2012
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