1/5/23, 2:35 PM Floyd Warshall Algorithm.

Shortest Path Algorithm | by Sridharan T | Dev Genius

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Floyd Warshall Algorithm

Shortest Path Algorithm

Confused to choose the shortest path from your location to destination?. Then, you
should know about this algorithm.

Floyd–Warshall’s Algorithm is used to find the shortest paths between all pairs
of vertices in a graph, where each edge in the graph has a weight which is
positive or negative.

The biggest advantage of using this algorithm is that all the shortest distances
between any 2 vertices could be calculated in O(V3), where V is the number of
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1/5/23, 2:35 PM Floyd Warshall Algorithm. Shortest Path Algorithm | by Sridharan T | Dev Genius

vertices in a graph.

Floyd-Warshall algorithm is also called as Floyd’s algorithm, Roy-Floyd

algorithm, Roy-Warshall algorithm, or WFI algorithm.

This algorithm follows the dynamic programming approach to find the shortest
paths.

Algorithm
For a graph with N vertices:

Step 1: Initialize the shortest paths between any 2 vertices with Infinity.

Step 2: Find all pair shortest paths that use 0 intermediate vertices, then find the
shortest paths that use 1 intermediate vertex and so on.. until using all N vertices as
intermediate nodes.

Step 3: Minimize the shortest paths between any 2 pairs in the previous operation.

Step 4: For any 2 vertices (i,j) , one should actually minimize the distances between
this pair using the first K nodes, so the shortest path will be: min(dist[i][k]+dist[k]
[j],dist[i][j]).

dist[i][k] represents the shortest path that only uses the first K vertices, dist[k][j]
represents the shortest path between the pair k,j. As the shortest path will be a
concatenation of the shortest path from i to k, then from k to j.

for(int k = 1; k <= n; k++){

for(int i = 1; i <= n; i++){
for(int j = 1; j <= n; j++){
dist[i][j] = min( dist[i][j], dist[i][k] + dist[k][j] );
}
}
}

Example
Let the given graph be:

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1/5/23, 2:35 PM Floyd Warshall Algorithm. Shortest Path Algorithm | by Sridharan T | Dev Genius

Follow the steps below to find the shortest path between all the pairs of vertices.

1. Create a matrix A0 of dimension n*n where n is the number of vertices. The

row and the column are indexed as i and j respectively. i and j are the vertices of
the graph.

Each cell A[i][j] is filled with the distance from the ith vertex to the jth vertex. If
there is no path from ith vertex to jth vertex, the cell is left as infinity.

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1/5/23, 2:35 PM Floyd Warshall Algorithm. Shortest Path Algorithm | by Sridharan T | Dev Genius

2. Now, create a matrix A1 using matrix A0 . The elements in the first column and
the first row are left as they are. The remaining cells are filled in the following way.

Let k be the freezing vertex in the shortest path from source to destination. In this
step, k is the first vertex. A[i][j] is filled with (A[i][k] + A[k][j]) if (A[i][j] >

A[i][k] + A[k][j]) .

That is, if the direct distance from the source to the destination is greater than the
path through the vertex k, then the cell is filled with A[i][k] + A[k][j] .

In this step, k is vertex 1. We calculate the distance from the source vertex to
destination vertex through this vertex k.

For example: For A1[2, 4] , the direct distance from vertex 2 to 4 is 4 and the sum of
the distance from vertex 2 to 4 through vertex (i.e. from vertex 2 to 1 and from
vertex 1 to 4) is 7. Since 4 < 7 , A0[2, 4] is filled with 4.

3. In a similar way, A2 is created using A3 . The elements in the second column and
the second row are left as they are.

In this step, k is the second vertex (i.e. vertex 2). The remaining steps are the same
as in step 2.

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1/5/23, 2:35 PM Floyd Warshall Algorithm. Shortest Path Algorithm | by Sridharan T | Dev Genius

4. Similarly, A3 and A4 is also created.

5. A4 gives the shortest path between each pair of vertices.

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