On The Complexity of Maximizing Temporal Reachability via Trip Temporalisation

TL;DR

This paper studies the complexity of scheduling edges in temporal graphs to maximize reachability, revealing NP-completeness and approximation hardness, while identifying conditions where good solutions are guaranteed.

Contribution

It proves NP-completeness of the temporal reachability maximization problem under trip-based constraints and introduces the concept of strong temporalisability for public transit applications.

Findings

Deciding reachability with trip constraints is NP-complete.

Maximizing reachability cannot be approximated within a certain polynomial factor.

Existence of strongly temporalisable trip collections with limited reachability.

Abstract

We consider the problem of assigning appearing times to the edges of a digraph in order to maximize the (average) temporal reachability between pairs of nodes. Motivated by the application to public transit networks, where edges cannot be scheduled independently one of another, we consider the setting where the edges are grouped into certain walks (called trips) in the digraph and where assigning the appearing time to the first edge of a trip forces the appearing times of the subsequent edges. In this setting, we show that, quite surprisingly, it is NP-complete to decide whether there exists an assignment of times connecting a given pair of nodes. This result allows us to prove that the problem of maximising the temporal reachability cannot be approximated within a factor better than some polynomial term in the size of the graph. We thus focus on the case where, for each pair of nodes, there exists an assignment of times such that one node is reachable from the other. We call this property strong temporalisability. It is a very natural assumption for the application to public transit networks. On the negative side, the problem of maximising the temporal reachability remains hard to approximate within a factor $\sqrt$ n/12 in that setting. Moreover, we show the existence of collections of trips that are strongly temporalisable but for which any assignment of starting times to the trips connects at most an O(1/ $\sqrt$ n) fraction of all pairs of nodes. On the positive side, we show that there must exist an assignment of times that connects a constant fraction of all pairs in the strongly temporalisable and symmetric case, that is, when the set of trips to be scheduled is such that, for each trip, there is a symmetric trip visiting the same nodes in reverse order. Keywords:edge labeling edge scheduled network network optimisation temporal graph temporal path temporal reachability time assignment