A new approach to dynamic all pairs shortest paths

  • Authors:
  • Camil Demetrescu;Giuseppe F. Italiano

  • Affiliations:
  • Università di Roma "La Sapienza", Rome, Italy;Università di Roma "Tor Vergata", Rome, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the ACM (JACM)
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

We study novel combinatorial properties of graphs that allow us to devise a completely new approach to dynamic all pairs shortest paths problems. Our approach yields a fully dynamic algorithm for general directed graphs with non-negative real-valued edge weights that supports any sequence of operations in O(n2log3n) amortized time per update and unit worst-case time per distance query, where n is the number of vertices. We can also report shortest paths in optimal worst-case time. These bounds improve substantially over previous results and solve a long-standing open problem. Our algorithm is deterministic, uses simple data structures, and appears to be very fast in practice.