Finding k Simple Shortest Paths and Cycles
The problem of finding multiple simple shortest paths in a weighted directed graph $G=(V,E) has many applications, and is considerably more difficult than the corresponding problem when cycles are allowed in the paths. Even for a single source sink pair, it is known that two simple shortest paths cannot be found in time polynomially smaller than $n^3$ (where $n=|V| unless the All Pairs Shortest Paths problem can be solved in a similar time bound. The latter is a well known open problem in algorithm design. We consider the all pairs version of the problem, and we give a new algorithm to find $k$ simple shortest paths for all pairs of vertices. For $k=2$ our algorithm runs in $O(mn n^2 \log n) time (where $m=|E| which is almost the same bound as for the single pair case, and for $k=3$ we improve earlier bounds. Our approach is based on forming suitable path extensions to find simple shortest paths; this method is different from the `detour finding' technique used in most of the prior work on simple shortest paths, replacement paths, and distance sensitivity oracles. Enumerating simple cycles is a well studied classical problem. We present new algorithms for generating simple cycles and simple paths in $G$ in non decreasing order of their weights; the algorithm for generating simple paths is much faster, and uses another variant of path extensions. We also give hardness results for sparse graphs, relative to the complexity of computing a minimum weight cycle in a graph, for several variants of problems related to finding $k$ simple paths and cycles.
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