Experimental analysis of dynamic algorithms for the single source shortest paths problem

Abstract

In this paper we propose the first experimental study of the fully dynamic single-source shortest-paths problem on directed graphs with positive real edge weights. In particular, we perform an experimental analysis of three different algorithms: Dijkstra's algorithm, and the two output bounded algorithms proposed by Ramalingam and Reps in [30] and by Frigioni, Marchetti-Spaccamela and Nanni in [18], respectively. The main goal of this paper is to provide a first experimental evidence for: (a) the effectiveness of dynamic algorithms for shortest paths with respect to a traditional static approach to this problem; (b) the validity of the theoretical model of output boundedness to analyze dynamic graph algorithms. Beside random generated graphs, useful to capture the "asymptotic" behavior of the algorithms, we also developed experiments by considering a widely used graph from the real world, i.e., the Internet graph.