The Complexity of Routing with Few Collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the computational complexity of routing multiple objects with minimal collisions in networks, revealing NP-completeness for paths and trails, but polynomial solvability for walks under certain conditions.

Contribution

It establishes complexity classifications for different route types and introduces a length-restricted variant, expanding understanding of collision-minimizing routing problems.

Findings

NP-complete for paths and trails on undirected and directed graphs

Polynomial-time solvability for walks on undirected graphs with arbitrary k

Length-restricted variant shares the same complexity for paths and trails, but is NP-complete for walks on undirected graphs

Abstract

We study the computational complexity of routing multiple objects through a network in such a way that only few collisions occur: Given a graph $G$ with two distinct terminal vertices and two positive integers $p$ and $k$, the question is whether one can connect the terminals by at least $p$ routes (e.g. paths) such that at most $k$ edges are time-wise shared among them. We study three types of routes: traverse each vertex at most once (paths), each edge at most once (trails), or no such restrictions (walks). We prove that for paths and trails the problem is NP-complete on undirected and directed graphs even if $k$ is constant or the maximum vertex degree in the input graph is constant. For walks, however, it is solvable in polynomial time on undirected graphs for arbitrary $k$ and on directed graphs if $k$ is constant. We additionally study for all route types a variant of the problem where the maximum length of a route is restricted by some given upper bound. We prove that this length-restricted variant has the same complexity classification with respect to paths and trails, but for walks it becomes NP-complete on undirected graphs.