A Faster Algorithm for Finding Disjoint Paths in Grids

  • Authors:
  • Wun-Tat Chan;Francis Y. L. Chin;Hing-Fung Ting

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ISAAC '99 Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Given a set of sources and a set of sinks in the two dimensional grid of size n, the disjoint paths (DP) problem is to connect every source to a distinct sink by a set of edge-disjoint paths. Let v be the total number of sources and sinks. In [3], Chan and Chin showed that without loss of generality we can assume v ≤ n ≤ 4v2. They also showed how to compress the grid optimally to a dynamic network (structure of the network may change depending on the paths found currently) of size O(√nv), and solve the problem in O(√nv3/2) time using augmenting path method in maximum flow. In this paper, we improve the time complexity of solving the DP problem to O(n3/4v3/4). The factor of improvement is as large as √v when n is Θ(v), while it is at least 4√v for n is Θ(v2).