Reachability is the problem of deciding whether there is a path from one vertex to the other in the graph. Standard graph traversal algorithms such as DFS and BFS take linear time to decide reachability; however, their space complexity is also linear. On the other hand, Savitch\u27s algorithm takes quasipolynomial time although the space bound is O(log^2 n). Here, we study space efficient algorithms for deciding reachability that run in polynomial time.
In this paper, we show that given an n vertex directed graph of treewidth w along with its tree decomposition, there exists an algorithm running in polynomial time and O(w log n) space that solves the reachability problem
