Fast Fibonacci heaps with worst case extensions

TL;DR

This paper introduces simplified, efficient Fibonacci heaps with worst-case guarantees, reducing overhead and maintaining optimal asymptotic times for key operations, suitable for practical implementation.

Contribution

It proposes a new approach to Fibonacci heaps that minimizes overhead and allows worst-case operation guarantees without complex violation list maintenance.

Findings

Achieved worst-case bounds for heap operations with reduced overhead

Implemented full DecreaseKey-Meld interface in the proposed heaps

Demonstrated practical implementation advantages using arrays over pointers

Abstract

We are concentrating on reducing overhead of heaps based on comparisons with optimal worstcase behaviour. The paper is inspired by Strict Fibonacci Heaps [1], where G. S. Brodal, G. Lagogiannis, and R. E. Tarjan implemented the heap with DecreaseKey and Meld interface in assymptotically optimal worst case times (based on key comparisons). In the paper [2], the ideas were elaborated and it was shown that the same asymptotical times could be achieved with a strategy loosing much less information from previous comparisons. There is big overhead with maintainance of violation lists in these heaps. We propose simple alternative reducing this overhead. It allows us to implement fast amortized Fibonacci heaps, where user could call some methods in variants guaranting worst case time. If he does so, the heaps are not guaranted to be Fibonacci until an amortized version of a method is called. Of course we could call worst case versions all the time, but as there is an overhead with the guarantee, calling amortized versions is prefered choice if we are not concentrated on complexity of the separate operation. We have shown, we could implement full DecreaseKey-Meld interface, but Meld interface is not natural for these heaps, so if Meld is not needed, much simpler implementation suffices. As I don't know application requiring Meld, we would concentrate on noMeld variant, but we will show the changes could be applied on Meld including variant as well. The papers [1], [2] shown the heaps could be implemented on pointer machine model. For fast practical implementations we would rather use arrays. Our goal is to reduce number of pointer manipulations. Maintainance of ranks by pointers to rank lists would be unnecessary overhead.