Experimental Evaluation of a New Shortest Path Algorithm (Extended Abstract)

We evaluate the practical efficiency of a new shortest path algorithm for undirected graphs which was developed by the first two authors. This algorithm works on the fundamental comparison-addition model. Theoretically, this new algorithm out-performs Dijkstra's algorithm on sparse graphs for the all-pairs shortest path problem, and more generally, for the problem of computing single-source shortest paths from ω(1) different sources. Our extensive experimentalanalysis demonstrates that this is also the case in practice. We present results which show the new algorithm to run faster than Dijkstra's on a variety of sparse graphs when the number of vertices ranges from a few thousand to a few million, and when computing single-source shortest paths from as few as three different sources.

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