Find the shortest path in a graph which visits certain nodes

Question

I have a undirected graph with about 100 nodes and about 200 edges. One node is labelled 'start', one is 'end', and there's about a dozen labelled 'mustpass'.

I need to find the shortest path through this graph that starts at 'start', ends at 'end', and passes through all of the 'mustpass' nodes (in any order).

( http://3e.org/local/maize-graph.png / http://3e.org/local/maize-graph.dot.txt is the graph in question - it represents a corn maze in Lancaster, PA)

Solution 1

Everyone else comparing this to the Travelling Salesman Problem probably hasn't read your question carefully. In TSP, the objective is to find the shortest cycle that visits all the vertices (a Hamiltonian cycle) -- it corresponds to having every node labelled 'mustpass'.

In your case, given that you have only about a dozen labelled 'mustpass', and given that 12! is rather small (479001600), you can simply try all permutations of only the 'mustpass' nodes, and look at the shortest path from 'start' to 'end' that visits the 'mustpass' nodes in that order -- it will simply be the concatenation of the shortest paths between every two consecutive nodes in that list.

In other words, first find the shortest distance between each pair of vertices (you can use Dijkstra's algorithm or others, but with those small numbers (100 nodes), even the simplest-to-code Floyd-Warshall algorithm will run in time). Then, once you have this in a table, try all permutations of your 'mustpass' nodes, and the rest.

Something like this:

//Precomputation: Find all pairs shortest paths, e.g. using Floyd-Warshall
n = number of nodes
for i=1 to n: for j=1 to n: d[i][j]=INF
for k=1 to n:
    for i=1 to n:
        for j=1 to n:
            d[i][j] = min(d[i][j], d[i][k] + d[k][j])
//That *really* gives the shortest distance between every pair of nodes! :-)

//Now try all permutations
shortest = INF
for each permutation a[1],a[2],...a[k] of the 'mustpass' nodes:
    shortest = min(shortest, d['start'][a[1]]+d[a[1]][a[2]]+...+d[a[k]]['end'])
print shortest

(Of course that's not real code, and if you want the actual path you'll have to keep track of which permutation gives the shortest distance, and also what the all-pairs shortest paths are, but you get the idea.)

It will run in at most a few seconds on any reasonable language :)
[If you have n nodes and k 'mustpass' nodes, its running time is O(n³) for the Floyd-Warshall part, and O(k!n) for the all permutations part, and 100^3+(12!)(100) is practically peanuts unless you have some really restrictive constraints.]

Solution 2

run Djikstra's Algorithm to find the shortest paths between all of the critical nodes (start, end, and must-pass), then a depth-first traversal should tell you the shortest path through the resulting subgraph that touches all of the nodes start ... mustpasses ... end

Solution 3

This is two problems... Steven Lowe pointed this out, but didn't give enough respect to the second half of the problem.

You should first discover the shortest paths between all of your critical nodes (start, end, mustpass). Once these paths are discovered, you can construct a simplified graph, where each edge in the new graph is a path from one critical node to another in the original graph. There are many pathfinding algorithms that you can use to find the shortest path here.

Once you have this new graph, though, you have exactly the Traveling Salesperson problem (well, almost... No need to return to your starting point). Any of the posts concerning this, mentioned above, will apply.

Solution 4

Actually, the problem you posted is similar to the traveling salesman, but I think closer to a simple pathfinding problem. Rather than needing to visit each and every node, you simply need to visit a particular set of nodes in the shortest time (distance) possible.

The reason for this is that, unlike the traveling salesman problem, a corn maze will not allow you to travel directly from any one point to any other point on the map without needing to pass through other nodes to get there.

I would actually recommend A* pathfinding as a technique to consider. You set this up by deciding which nodes have access to which other nodes directly, and what the "cost" of each hop from a particular node is. In this case, it looks like each "hop" could be of equal cost, since your nodes seem relatively closely spaced. A* can use this information to find the lowest cost path between any two points. Since you need to get from point A to point B and visit about 12 inbetween, even a brute force approach using pathfinding wouldn't hurt at all.

Just an alternative to consider. It does look remarkably like the traveling salesman problem, and those are good papers to read up on, but look closer and you'll see that its only overcomplicating things. ^_^ This coming from the mind of a video game programmer who's dealt with these kinds of things before.

Solution 5

This is not a TSP problem and not NP-hard because the original question does not require that must-pass nodes are visited only once. This makes the answer much, much simpler to just brute-force after compiling a list of shortest paths between all must-pass nodes via Dijkstra's algorithm. There may be a better way to go but a simple one would be to simply work a binary tree backwards. Imagine a list of nodes [start,a,b,c,end]. Sum the simple distances [start->a->b->c->end] this is your new target distance to beat. Now try [start->a->c->b->end] and if that's better set that as the target (and remember that it came from that pattern of nodes). Work backwards over the permutations:

• [start->a->b->c->end]
• [start->a->c->b->end]
• [start->b->a->c->end]
• [start->b->c->a->end]
• [start->c->a->b->end]
• [start->c->b->a->end]

One of those will be shortest.

(where are the 'visited multiple times' nodes, if any? They're just hidden in the shortest-path initialization step. The shortest path between a and b may contain c or even the end point. You don't need to care)

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