On the cardinality of the Pareto set in bicriteria shortest path problems

Matthias Müller-Hannemann () and Karsten Weihe ()

Annals of Operations Research, 2006, vol. 147, issue 1, 269-286

Abstract: Computing shortest paths with two or more conflicting optimization criteria is a fundamental problem in transportation and logistics. We study the problem of finding all Pareto-optimal solutions for the multi-criteria single-source shortest-path problem with nonnegative edge lengths. The standard approaches are generalizations of label-setting (Dijkstra) and label-correcting algorithms, in which the distance labels are multi-dimensional and more than one distance label is maintained for each node. The crucial parameter for the run time and space consumption is the total number of Pareto optima. In general, this value can be exponentially large in the input size. However, in various practical applications one can observe that the input data has certain characteristics, which may lead to a much smaller number—small enough to make the problem efficiently tractable from a practical viewpoint. For typical characteristics which occur in various applications we study in this paper whether we can bound the size of the Pareto set to a polynomial size or not. These characteristics are also evaluated (1) on a concrete application scenario (computing the set of best train connections in view of travel time, fare, and number of train changes) and (2) on a simplified randomized model. It will turn out that the number of Pareto optima on each visited node is restricted by a small constant in our concrete application, and that the size of the Pareto set is much smaller than our worst case bounds in the randomized model. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2006

Keywords: Multi-criteria optimization; Pareto search; Shortest paths; Railway networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10479-006-0072-1

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