Optimal In-place Algorithms for Basic Graph Problems

Abstract

We present linear time in-place algorithms for several fundamental graph problems including the well-known graph search methods (like depth-first search, breadth-first search, maximum cardinality search), connectivity problems (like biconnectivity, 2-edge connectivity), decomposition problem (like chain decomposition) among various others, improving the running time (by polynomial multiplicative factor) of the recent results of Chakraborty et al. [ESA, 2018] who designed O(n^3 lg n) time in-place algorithms for some of the above mentioned problems. The running times of all our algorithms are essentially optimal as they run in linear time. One of the main ideas behind obtaining these algorithms is the detection and careful exploitation of sortedness present in the input representation for any graph without loss of generality. This observation alone is powerful enough to design some basic linear time in-place algorithms, but more non-trivial graph problems require extra techniques which, we believe, may find other applications while designing in-place algorithms for different graph problems in future.