Algorithmic Aspects of Temporal Betweenness

Abstract

The betweenness centrality of a graph vertex measures how often this vertex is visited on shortest paths between other vertices of the graph. In the analysis of many real-world graphs or networks, betweenness centrality of a vertex is used as an indicator for its relative importance in the network. In recent years, a growing number of real-world networks is modeled as temporal graphs instead of conventional (static) graphs. In a temporal graph, we have a fixed set of vertices and there is a finite discrete set of time steps and every edge might be present only at some time steps. While shortest paths are straightforward to define in static graphs, temporal paths can be considered with respect to many different criteria, including length, arrival time, and overall travel time (shortest, foremost, and fastest paths). This leads to different concepts of temporal betweenness centrality, posing new challenges on the algorithmic side. We provide a systematic study of temporal betweenness variants based on various concepts of optimal temporal paths both on a theoretical and empirical level.