English

Finding the Center and Centroid of a Graph with Multiple Sources

Discrete Mathematics 2024-08-27 v1 Data Structures and Algorithms Social and Information Networks

Abstract

We consider the problem of finding a "fair" meeting place when S people want to get together. Specifically, we will consider the cases where a "fair" meeting place is defined to be either 1) a node on a graph that minimizes the maximum time/distance to each person or 2) a node on a graph that minimizes the sum of times/distances to each of the sources. In graph theory, these nodes are denoted as the center and centroid of a graph respectively. In this paper, we propose a novel solution for finding the center and centroid of a graph by using a multiple source alternating Dijkstra's Algorithm. Additionally, we introduce a stopping condition that significantly saves on time complexity without compromising the accuracy of the solution. The results of this paper are a low complexity algorithm that is optimal in computing the center of S sources among N nodes and a low complexity algorithm that is close to optimal for computing the centroid of S sources among N nodes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2408.13688,
  title  = {Finding the Center and Centroid of a Graph with Multiple Sources},
  author = {Matthew Chou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.13688},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

19 pages, 9 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:23:04.806Z