Solving Paths Search Problems in Complex Graphs

Abstract

The construction of models of various systems is associated with the enumeration of the values of the parameters of the elements of the structure and taking into account all the characteristics of operation and interaction of components to find a certain set of solutions that determine the configuration of the system. Such tasks belong to enumeration type tasks and imply that some of the next solutions from this set are obtained from the previous solution in a certain order. It is known that any problem of the enumeration type is solved only by methods of exhaustive search, and other methods for their enumeration do not exist yet. The paper presents a new method of searching paths in a graph – the method of node-graph transformation. The proposed method, unlike the existing ones, allows one to search all directed simple paths in an oriented graph of arbitrary structure much faster. In the known graph search methods (Breadth First Search and Depth First Search), the object of the search is a path. The total number of such paths in the graph determines the size of the search space. The main idea of the node-graph transformation method is to significantly reduce the size of the search space by enlarging the search objects. The enlargement of enumeration objects is performed by clustering paths into combinatorial objects that concentrate some set of paths of the same length according to certain rules. These combinatorial objects are called node-graphs. A node-graph refers to center-peripheral combinatorial objects, and specific node-graph transformation operations have been developed to enumerate all paths in the graph, which allow finding new paths based on previous paths. The method can be used as a basic toolkit to reduce the dimensionality of the search space for solutions to NP-complete problems while maintaining the universality and accuracy of the full search.