In this paper we study a variant of the shortest path problem in graphs:
given a weighted graph G and vertices s and t, and given a set X of forbidden
paths in G, find a shortest s-t path P such that no path in X is a subpath of
P. Path P is allowed to repeat vertices and edges. We call each path in X an
exception, and our desired path a shortest exception-avoiding path. We
formulate a new version of the problem where the algorithm has no a priori
knowledge of X, and finds out about an exception x in X only when a path
containing x fails. This situation arises in computing shortest paths in
optical networks. We give an algorithm that finds a shortest exception avoiding
path in time polynomial in |G| and |X|. The main idea is to run Dijkstra's
algorithm incrementally after replicating vertices when an exception is
discovered.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures. Fixed a few typos, rephrased a few sentences,
and used the STACS styl
