Scribd
Upload
364 views

Design and Analysis of Algorithms (COM336) : Dijkstra's Algorithm

This document describes Project #3 for the Design and Analysis of Algorithms course, which involves implementing and optimizing Dijkstra's algorithm to solve shortest path problems on maps. Students are asked to read in a map file, optionally preprocess it, and then answer thousands of shortest path queries between vertices in sublinear time. The document provides details on Dijkstra's algorithm and suggests speeding it up by stopping search as soon as the destination is found and reinitializing only changed values from the previous query. It also provides a test file on a map of the continental United States with over 87,000 intersections to test the optimized implementation.

Uploaded by

ff
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
364 views

Design and Analysis of Algorithms (COM336) : Dijkstra's Algorithm

This document describes Project #3 for the Design and Analysis of Algorithms course, which involves implementing and optimizing Dijkstra's algorithm to solve shortest path problems on maps. Students are asked to read in a map file, optionally preprocess it, and then answer thousands of shortest path queries between vertices in sublinear time. The document provides details on Dijkstra's algorithm and suggests speeding it up by stopping search as soon as the destination is found and reinitializing only changed values from the previous query. It also provides a test file on a map of the continental United States with over 87,000 intersections to test the optimized implementation.

Uploaded by

ff
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 3

Design and Analysis of Algorithms (COM336)

Second Semester 2019/2020


Project # 3
Dijkstra’s algorithm
Implement the classic Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm and optimize it for maps. Such
algorithms are widely used in geographic information systems (GIS) including MapQuest
and GPS-based car navigation systems.
Maps. For this assignment we will be working with maps, or graphs whose vertices are
points in the plane and are connected by edges whose weights are Euclidean distances.
Think of the vertices as cities and the edges as roads connected to them. To represent a
map in a file, we list the number of vertices and edges, then list the vertices (index followed
by its x and y coordinates), then list the edges (pairs of vertices), and finally the source and
sink vertices. For example, represents the map below:

Dijkstra’s algorithm. Dijkstra’s algorithm is a classic solution to the shortest path problem
on a weighted graph. The basic idea is not difficult to understand. We maintain, for every
vertex in the graph, the length of the shortest known path from the source to that vertex,
and we maintain these lengths in a priority queue. Initially, we put all the vertices on the
queue with an artificially high priority and then assign priority 0.0 to the source. The
algorithm proceeds by taking the lowest-priority vertex off the PQ, then checking all the
vertices that can be reached from that vertex by one edge to see whether that edge gives a
shorter path to the vertex from the source than the shortest previously-known path. If so, it
lowers the priority to reflect this new information.
Here is a step-by-step description that shows how Dijkstra’s algorithm finds the shortest
path 0-1-2-5 from 0 to 5 in the example above:
process 0 (0.0)
lower 3 to 3841.9
lower 1 to 1897.4
process 1 (1897.4)
lower 4 to 3776.2
lower 2 to 2537.7
process 2 (2537.7)
lower 5 to 6274.0
process 4 (3776.2)
process 3 (3841.9)
process 5 (6274.0)

This method computes the length of the shortest path. To keep track of the path, we also
maintain for each vertex, its predecessor on the shortest path from the source to that vertex.
Your goal. Optimize Dijkstra’s algorithm so that it can process thousands of shortest path
queries for a given map. Once you read in (and optionally preprocess) the map, your
program should solve shortest path problems in sublinear time. One method would be to
precompute the shortest path for all pairs of vertices; however you cannot afford the
quadratic space required to store all of this information. Your goal is to reduce the amount
of work involved per shortest path computation, without using excessive space.

Idea. The naive implementation of Dijkstra’s algorithm examines all V vertices in the
graph. An obvious strategy to reduce the number of vertices examined is to stop the search
as soon as you discover the shortest path to the destination. With this approach, you can
make the running time per shortest path query proportional to E’ log V’ where E’ and V’
are the number of edges and vertices examined by Dijkstra’s algorithm. However, this
requires some care because just re-initializing all of the distances to ∞ would take time
proportional to V. Since you are doing repeated queries, you can speed things up
dramatically by only re-initializing those values that changed in the previous query.

Testing. The file usa.txt contains 87,575 intersections and 121,961 roads in the continental
United States. The graph is very sparse. Your main goal should be to answer shortest path
queries quickly for pairs of vertices on this network. Your algorithm will likely perform
differently depending on whether the two vertices are nearby or far apart. We provide input
files that test both cases. You may assume that all of the x and y coordinates are integers
between 0 and 10,000.
You can test your code using the files test.txt on the map usa.txt

You might also like