Engineering DFS-Based Graph Algorithms

TL;DR

This paper presents optimized techniques for implementing DFS-based graph algorithms, achieving significant speed-ups over existing libraries like LEDA and BOOST, and demonstrates their effectiveness on strongly connected components and biconnected components algorithms.

Contribution

The paper introduces general efficient implementation techniques for DFS-based algorithms and applies them to improve performance on key graph problems.

Findings

Speed-ups of 2-3x over LEDA and BOOST implementations.

Effective techniques for strongly connected components and biconnected components.

Comparison of LEDA and BOOST graph data types.

Abstract

Depth-first search (DFS) is the basis for many efficient graph algorithms. We introduce general techniques for the efficient implementation of DFS-based graph algorithms and exemplify them on three algorithms for computing strongly connected components. The techniques lead to speed-ups by a factor of two to three compared to the implementations provided by LEDA and BOOST. We have obtained similar speed-ups for biconnected components algorithms. We also compare the graph data types of LEDA and BOOST.