English

Reachability in temporal graphs under perturbation

Discrete Mathematics 2025-05-23 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

Reachability and other path-based measures on temporal graphs can be used to understand spread of infection, information, and people in modelled systems. Due to delays and errors in reporting, temporal graphs derived from data are unlikely to perfectly reflect reality, especially with respect to the precise times at which edges appear. To reflect this uncertainty, we consider a model in which some number ζ\zeta of edge appearances may have their timestamps perturbed by ±δ\pm\delta for some δ\delta. Within this model, we investigate temporal reachability and consider the problem of determining the maximum number of vertices any vertex can reach under these perturbations. We show that this problem is intractable in general but is efficiently solvable when ζ\zeta is sufficiently large. We also give algorithms which solve this problem in several restricted settings. We complement this with some contrasting results concerning the complexity of related temporal eccentricity problems under perturbation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2404.19479,
  title  = {Reachability in temporal graphs under perturbation},
  author = {Jessica Enright and Laura Larios-Jones and Kitty Meeks and William Pettersson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.19479},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

45 pages, 3 figures. Short version published in proceedings of SOFSEM 2025

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:11:11.468Z