Join-Reachability Problems in Directed Graphs

For a given collection G of directed graphs we define the join-reachability graph of G, denoted by J(G), as the directed graph that, for any pair of vertices a and b, contains a path from a to b if and only if such a path exists in all graphs of G. Our goal is to compute an efficient representation of J(G). In particular, we consider two versions of this problem. In the explicit version we wish to construct the smallest join-reachability graph for G. In the implicit version we wish to build an efficient data structure (in terms of space and query time) such that we can report fast the set of vertices that reach a query vertex in all graphs of G. This problem is related to the well-studied reachability problem and is motivated by emerging applications of graph-structured databases and graph algorithms. We consider the construction of join-reachability structures for two graphs and develop techniques that can be applied to both the explicit and the implicit problem. First we present optimal and near-optimal structures for paths and trees. Then, based on these results, we provide efficient structures for planar graphs and general directed graphs

A Heuristic for Direct Product Graph Decomposition

In this paper we describe a heuristic for decomposing a directed graph into factors according to the direct product (also known as Kronecker, cardinal or tensor product). Given a directed, unweighted graph G with adjacency matrix Adj(G), our heuristic aims at identifying two graphs G 1 and G 2 such that G = G 1 × G 2 , where G 1 × G 2 is the direct product of G 1 and G 2 . For undirected, connected graphs it has been shown that graph decomposition is “at least as difficult” as graph isomorphism; therefore, polynomial-time algorithms for decomposing a general directed graph into factors are unlikely to exist. Although graph factorization is a problem that has been extensively investigated, the heuristic proposed in this paper represents – to the best of our knowledge – the first computational approach for general directed, unweighted graphs. We have implemented our algorithm using the MATLAB environment; we report on a set of experiments that show that the proposed heuristic solves reasonably- sized instances in a few seconds on general-purpose hardware. Although the proposed heuristic is not guaranteed to find a factorization, even if one exists; however, it always succeeds on all the randomly-generated instances used in the experimental evaluation