Shortest Path

• Generalize distance to weighted setting

• Digraph G = (V,E) with weight function W: E → R
(assigning real values to edges)
• Weight of path p = v1 → v2 → … → vk is
k −1
w( p) =  w(vi , vi +1 )
i =1
• Shortest path = a path of the minimum weight
• Applications
– static/dynamic network routing
– robot motion planning
– map/route generation in traffic

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 Shortest-Path Problems
• Shortest-Path problems
– Single-source (single-destination). Find a shortest path
from a given source (vertex s) to each of the vertices. The
topic of this lecture.
– Single-pair. Given two vertices, find a shortest path
between them. Solution to single-source problem solves
this problem efficiently, too.
– All-pairs. Find shortest-paths for every pair of vertices.
Dynamic programming algorithm.
– Unweighted shortest-paths – BFS.

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 Optimal Substructure
• Theorem: subpaths of shortest paths are
shortest paths
• Proof (cut and paste)
– if some subpath were not the shortest path, one
could substitute the shorter subpath and create a
shorter total path

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 Triangle Inequality
• Definition
– (u,v)  weight of a shortest path from u to v
• Theorem
– (u,v)  (u,x) + (x,v) for any x
• Proof
– shortest path u v is no longer than any other path u v –
in particular, the path concatenating the shortest path u x
with the shortest path x v

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 Negative Weights and Cycles?
• Negative edges are OK, as long as there are no
negative weight cycles (otherwise paths with
arbitrary small “lengths” would be possible)
• Shortest-paths can have no cycles (otherwise
we could improve them by removing cycles)
– Any shortest-path in graph G can be no longer
than n – 1 edges, where n is the number of
vertices

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 Relaxation
• For each vertex in the graph, we maintain d[v], the
estimate of the shortest path from s, initialized to 
at start
• Relaxing an edge (u,v) means testing whether we can
improve the shortest path to v found so far by going
through u
Relax (u,v,w)
u v u v
2 2 if d[v] > d[u]+w(u,v)then
    d[v]  d[u]+w(u,v)
[v]  u
Relax(u,v) Relax(u,v)

 2   2 
u v u v
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 Dijkstra's Algorithm
• Non-negative edge weights
• Greedy, similar to Prim's algorithm for MST
• Like breadth-first search (if all weights = 1, one can
simply use BFS)
• Use Q, priority queue keyed by d[v] (BFS used FIFO
queue, here we use a PQ, which is re-organized
whenever some d decreases)
• Basic idea
– maintain a set S of solved vertices
– at each step select "closest" vertex u, add it to S, and relax
all edges from u

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 Dijkstra’s Pseudo Code
• Graph G, weight function w, root s

relaxing
edges

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 Dijkstra’s Example
u v u v
1 1
10   10  
9 9
2 3 2 3
s  4 6 s  4 6
7 7
5 5
 2   2 
x y x y
u v u v
1 1
10   10  
9 9
2 3
s  2 3
4 6
s  4 6
7 7
5 5
   2 
2
x y x y

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 Dijkstra’s Example (2)
u v u v
1 1
10   10  
9 9
2 3 2 3
 4 6  4 6
7 7
5 5
 2   2 
x y x y

• Observe
– relaxation step (lines 10-11)
– setting d[v] updates Q (needs Decrease-Key)
– similar to Prim's MST algorithm

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 Dijkstra’s Correctness
• We will prove that whenever u is added to S, d[u] =
(s,u), i.e., that d is minimum, and that equality is
maintained thereafter
• Proof
– Note that v, d[v]  (s,v)
– Let u be the first vertex picked such that there is a shorter
path than d[u], i.e., that  d[u]  (s,u)
– We will show that this assumption leads to a contradiction

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 Dijkstra Correctness (2)
• Let y be the first vertex V – S on the actual shortest
path from s to u, then it must be that d[y] = (s,y)
because
– d[x] is set correctly for y's predecessor x S on the shortest
path (by choice of u as the first vertex for which d is set
incorrectly)
– when the algorithm inserted x into S, it relaxed the edge
(x,y), assigning d[y] the correct value

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 Dijkstra Correctness (3)

d [u ]  ( s , u ) (initial assumption)
= ( s , y ) + ( y , u ) (optimal substructure)
= d [ y ] + ( y , u ) (correctness of d [ y ])
 d[ y] (no negative weights)

• But d[u] > d[y]  algorithm would have chosen y

(from the PQ) to process next, not u  Contradiction
• Thus d[u] = (s,u) at time of insertion of u into S, and
Dijkstra's algorithm is correct

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 Dijkstra’s Running Time
• Extract-Min executed |V| time
• Decrease-Key executed |E| time
• Time = |V| TExtract-Min + |E| TDecrease-Key
• T depends on different Q implementations

Q T(Extract T(Decrease- Total

-Min) Key)
array ( V) (1) (V 2 )
binary heap (lg V) (lg V) (E lg V)
Fibonacci heap (lg V) (1) (amort.) (V lgV + E)

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