English

Shortest two disjoint paths in conservative graphs

Data Structures and Algorithms 2024-01-10 v3

Abstract

We consider the following problem that we call the Shortest Two Disjoint Paths problem: given an undirected graph G=(V,E)G=(V,E) with edge weights w:ERw:E \rightarrow \mathbb{R}, two terminals ss and tt in GG, find two internally vertex-disjoint paths between ss and tt with minimum total weight. As shown recently by Schlotter and Seb\H{o} (2022), this problem becomes NP-hard if edges can have negative weights, even if the weight function is conservative, there are no cycles in GG with negative total weight. We propose a polynomial-time algorithm that solves the Shortest Two Disjoint Paths problem for conservative weights in the case when the negative-weight edges form a constant number of trees in GG.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2307.12602,
  title  = {Shortest two disjoint paths in conservative graphs},
  author = {Ildikó Schlotter},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.12602},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

A version of this paper has been accepted to the 41st International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2024)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:38:24.255Z