Temporal Routing in Static Networks: The Schedule Completion Problem

TL;DR

This paper introduces the TEDSC problem, a polynomial-time algorithm for routing temporal edge-disjoint walks in static networks, and explores its variants' complexities and approximation methods.

Contribution

It presents a polynomial-time solution for TEDSC and analyzes the complexity of its restricted variants under different parameters.

Findings

Polynomial-time algorithm for TEDSC.

Both variants are tractable when parameterized by k + h.

Distance variant remains W[1]-hard on simple networks.

Abstract

We introduce the TemporallyEdgeDisjointScheduleCompletion (TEDSC) problem in which we need to cover a set of temporal edge demands $D$ by routing $k$ temporal walks through a directed static graph while remaining temporally edge disjoint. This problem combines the temporal aspects of train routing and passenger demands with the static nature of real-world rail networks. We present a polynomial time algorithm for TEDSC. Motivated by real world constraints, we next investigate two restricted variants of TEDSC in which each walk can only travel for some bounded distance or time $h$. We show that both are tractable when parameterized by $k + h$, but hard for $h$ and $k + |D|$. If we fix the underlying network, the two problems exhibit distinct complexities: The distance variant remains $W[1]$-hard parameterized by $k$ even on a path of three vertices whereas the time variant admits an FPT algorithm on any fixed star. Finally, we show how to approximate the number of required walks up to a factor of $(2-h^{-1})$.