arXiv subjects

Dorothea Wagner

Publications and source records attributed to Dorothea Wagner.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Customizable Contraction Hierarchies -- A Survey

This work establishes the technical fundamentals of a well-tuned Customizable Contraction Hierarchies (CCH) implementation that is simple and elegant. We give a detailed overview of the state of the art of CCH, review recent advances on CCH and show how to combine them. Additionally, we propose further refinements that improve the performance of CCH. An extensive evaluation confirms that a CCH framework is not only comprehensive in supported features but also competitive in performance to both Contraction Hierarchies (CH) and Customizable Route Planning (CRP).

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arXiv2023

Engineering Negative Cycle Canceling for Wind Farm Cabling

In a wind farm turbines convert wind energy into electrical energy. The generation of each turbine is transmitted, possibly via other turbines, to a substation that is connected to the power grid. On every possible interconnection there can be at most one of various different cable types. Each type comes with a cost per unit length and with a capacity. Designing a cost-minimal cable layout for a wind farm to feed all turbine production into the power grid is called the Wind Farm Cabling Problem (WCP). We consider a formulation of WCP as a flow problem on a graph where the cost of a flow on an edge is modeled by a step function originating from the cable types. Recently, we presented a proof-of-concept for a negative cycle canceling-based algorithm for WCP [14]. We extend key steps of that heuristic and build a theoretical foundation that explains how this heuristic tackles the problems arising from the special structure of WCP. A thorough experimental evaluation identifies the best setup of the algorithm and compares it to existing methods from the literature such as Mixed-integer Linear Programming (MILP) and Simulated Annealing (SA). The heuristic runs in a range of half a millisecond to approximately one and a half minutes on instances with up to 500 turbines. It provides solutions of similar quality compared to both competitors with running times of one hour and one day. When comparing the solution quality after a running time of two seconds, our algorithm outperforms the MILP- and SA-approaches, which allows it to be applied in interactive wind farm planning.

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arXiv2023

UnLimited TRAnsfers for Multi-Modal Route Planning: An Efficient Solution

We study a multimodal journey planning scenario consisting of a public transit network and a transfer graph which represents a secondary transportation mode (e.g., walking, cycling, e-scooter). The objective is to compute Pareto-optimal journeys with respect to arrival time and the number of used public transit trips. While various existing algorithms can efficiently compute optimal journeys in either a pure public transit network or a pure transfer graph, combining the two increases running times significantly. Existing approaches therefore typically only support limited walking between stops, either by imposing a maximum transfer distance or by requiring the transfer graph to be transitively closed. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a novel preprocessing technique called ULTRA (UnLimited TRAnsfers): Given an unlimited transfer graph, which may represent any non-schedule-based transportation mode, ULTRA computes a small number of transfer shortcuts that are provably sufficient for computing a Pareto set of optimal journeys. These transfer shortcuts can be integrated into a variety of state-of-the-art public transit algorithms, establishing the ULTRA-Query algorithm family. Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that ULTRA improves these algorithms from limited to unlimited transfers without sacrificing query speed. This is true not just for walking, but also for faster transfer modes such as bicycle or car. Compared to the state of the art for multimodal journey planning, the fastest ULTRA-based algorithm achieves a speedup of an order of magnitude.

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arXiv2022

More Recent Advances in (Hyper)Graph Partitioning

In recent years, significant advances have been made in the design and evaluation of balanced (hyper)graph partitioning algorithms. We survey trends of the last decade in practical algorithms for balanced (hyper)graph partitioning together with future research directions. Our work serves as an update to a previous survey on the topic. In particular, the survey extends the previous survey by also covering hypergraph partitioning and streaming algorithms, and has an additional focus on parallel algorithms.

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arXiv2021

Fast, Exact and Scalable Dynamic Ridesharing

We study the problem of servicing a set of ride requests by dispatching a set of shared vehicles, which is faced by ridesharing companies such as Uber and Lyft. Solving this problem at a large scale might be crucial in the future for effectively using large fleets of autonomous vehicles. Since finding a solution for the entire set of requests that minimizes the total driving time is NP-complete, most practical approaches process the requests one by one. Each request is inserted into any vehicle's route such that the increase in driving time is minimized. Although this variant is solvable in polynomial time, it still takes considerable time in current implementations, even when inexact filtering heuristics are used. In this work, we present a novel algorithm for finding best insertions, based on (customizable) contraction hierarchies with local buckets. Our algorithm finds provably exact solutions, is still 30 times faster than a state-of-the-art algorithm currently used in industry and academia, and scales much better. When used within iterative transport simulations, our algorithm decreases the simulation time for largescale scenarios with many requests from days to hours.

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arXiv2021

Space-Efficient, Fast and Exact Routing in Time-Dependent Road Networks

We study the problem of quickly computing point-to-point shortest paths in massive road networks with traffic predictions. Incorporating traffic predictions into routing allows, for example, to avoid commuter traffic congestions. Existing techniques follow a two-phase approach: In a preprocessing step, an index is built. The index depends on the road network and the traffic patterns but not on the path start and end. The latter are the input of the query phase, in which shortest paths are computed. All existing techniques have large index size, slow query running times or may compute suboptimal paths. In this work, we introduce CATCHUp (Customizable Approximated Time-dependent Contraction Hierarchies through Unpacking), the first algorithm that simultaneously achieves all three objectives.The core idea of CATCHUp is to store paths instead of travel times at shortcuts. Shortcut travel times are derived lazily from the stored paths. We perform an experimental study on a set of real world instances and compare our approach with state-of-the-art techniques. Our approach achieves the fastest preprocessing, competitive query running times and up to 38 times smaller indexes than competing approaches.

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arXiv2021

Nearest-Neighbor Queries in Customizable Contraction Hierarchies and Applications

Customizable contraction hierarchies are one of the most popular route planning frameworks in practice, due to their simplicity and versatility. In this work, we present a novel algorithm for finding k-nearest neighbors in customizable contraction hierarchies by systematically exploring the associated separator decomposition tree. Compared to previous bucket-based approaches, our algorithm requires much less target-dependent preprocessing effort. Moreover, we use our novel approach in two concrete applications. The first application are online k-closest point-of-interest queries, where the points of interest are only revealed at query time. We achieve query times of about 25 milliseconds on a continental road network, which is fast enough for interactive systems. The second application is travel demand generation. We show how to accelerate a recently introduced travel demand generator by a factor of more than 50 using our novel nearest-neighbor algorithm.

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arXiv2020

Modeling and Engineering Constrained Shortest Path Algorithms for Battery Electric Vehicles

We study the problem of computing constrained shortest paths for battery electric vehicles. Since battery capacities are limited, fastest routes are often infeasible. Instead, users are interested in fast routes on which the energy consumption does not exceed the battery capacity. For that, drivers can deliberately reduce speed to save energy. Hence, route planning should provide both path and speed recommendations. To tackle the resulting NP-hard optimization problem, previous work trades correctness or accuracy of the underlying model for practical running times. We present a novel framework to compute optimal constrained shortest paths (without charging stops) for electric vehicles that uses more realistic physical models, while taking speed adaptation into account. Careful algorithm engineering makes the approach practical even on large, realistic road networks: We compute optimal solutions in less than a second for typical battery capacities, matching the performance of previous inexact methods. For even faster query times, the approach can easily be extended with heuristics that provide high quality solutions within milliseconds.

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arXiv2020

Zipping Segment Trees

Stabbing queries in sets of intervals are usually answered using segment trees. A dynamic variant of segment trees has been presented by van Kreveld and Overmars, which uses red-black trees to do rebalancing operations. This paper presents zipping segment trees - dynamic segment trees based on zip trees, which were recently introduced by Tarjan et al. To facilitate zipping segment trees, we show how to uphold certain segment tree properties during the operations of a zip tree. We present an in-depth experimental evaluation and comparison of dynamic segment trees based on red-black trees, weight-balanced trees and several variants of the novel zipping segment trees. Our results indicate that zipping segment trees perform better than rotation-based alternatives.

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arXiv2020

Engineering Exact Quasi-Threshold Editing

Quasi-threshold graphs are $\{C_4, P_4\}$-free graphs, i.e., they do not contain any cycle or path of four nodes as an induced subgraph. We study the $\{C_4, P_4\}$-free editing problem, which is the problem of finding a minimum number of edge insertions or deletions to transform an input graph into a quasi-threshold graph. This problem is NP-hard but fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) in the number of edits by using a branch-and-bound algorithm and admits a simple integer linear programming formulation (ILP). Both methods are also applicable to the general $F$-free editing problem for any finite set of graphs $F$. For the FPT algorithm, we introduce a fast heuristic for computing high-quality lower bounds and an improved branching strategy. For the ILP, we engineer several variants of row generation. We evaluate both methods for quasi-threshold editing on a large set of protein similarity graphs. For most instances, our optimizations speed up the FPT algorithm by one to three orders of magnitude. The running time of the ILP, that we solve using Gurobi, becomes only slightly faster. With all optimizations, the FPT algorithm is slightly faster than the ILP, even when listing all solutions. Additionally, we show that for almost all graphs, solutions of the previously proposed quasi-threshold editing heuristic QTM are close to optimal.

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arXiv2020

Advanced Flow-Based Multilevel Hypergraph Partitioning

The balanced hypergraph partitioning problem is to partition a hypergraph into $k$ disjoint blocks of bounded size such that the sum of the number of blocks connected by each hyperedge is minimized. We present an improvement to the flow-based refinement framework of KaHyPar-MF, the current state-of-the-art multilevel $k$-way hypergraph partitioning algorithm for high-quality solutions. Our improvement is based on the recently proposed HyperFlowCutter algorithm for computing bipartitions of unweighted hypergraphs by solving a sequence of incremental maximum flow problems. Since vertices and hyperedges are aggregated during the coarsening phase, refinement algorithms employed in the multilevel setting must be able to handle both weighted hyperedges and weighted vertices -- even if the initial input hypergraph is unweighted. We therefore enhance HyperFlowCutter to handle weighted instances and propose a technique for computing maximum flows directly on weighted hypergraphs. We compare the performance of two configurations of our new algorithm with KaHyPar-MF and seven other partitioning algorithms on a comprehensive benchmark set with instances from application areas such as VLSI design, scientific computing, and SAT solving. Our first configuration, KaHyPar-HFC, computes slightly better solutions than KaHyPar-MF using significantly less running time. The second configuration, KaHyPar-HFC*, computes solutions of significantly better quality and is still slightly faster than KaHyPar-MF. Furthermore, in terms of solution quality, both configurations also outperform all other competing partitioners.

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arXiv2019

Engineering Top-Down Weight-Balanced Trees

Weight-balanced trees are a popular form of self-balancing binary search trees. Their popularity is due to desirable guarantees, for example regarding the required work to balance annotated trees. While usual weight-balanced trees perform their balancing operations in a bottom-up fashion after a modification to the tree is completed, there exists a top-down variant which performs these balancing operations during descend. This variant has so far received only little attention. We provide an in-depth analysis and engineering of these top-down weight-balanced trees, demonstrating their superior performance. We also gaining insights into how the balancing parameters necessary for a weight-balanced tree should be chosen - with the surprising observation that it is often beneficial to choose parameters which are not feasible in the sense of the correctness proofs for the rebalancing algorithm.

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arXiv2019

Shortest Feasible Paths with Charging Stops for Battery Electric Vehicles

We study the problem of minimizing overall trip time for battery electric vehicles in road networks. As battery capacity is limited, stops at charging stations may be inevitable. Careful route planning is crucial, since charging stations are scarce and recharging is time-consuming. We extend the Constrained Shortest Path problem for electric vehicles with realistic models of charging stops, including varying charging power and battery swapping stations. While the resulting problem is NP-hard, we propose a combination of algorithmic techniques to achieve good performance in practice. Extensive experimental evaluation shows that our approach (CHArge) enables computation of optimal solutions on realistic inputs, even of continental scale. Finally, we investigate heuristic variants of CHArge that derive high-quality routes in well below a second on sensible instances.

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arXiv2019

Efficient Computation of Multi-Modal Public Transit Traffic Assignments using ULTRA

We study the problem of computing public transit traffic assignments in a multi-modal setting: Given a public transit timetable, an additional unrestricted transfer mode (in our case walking), and a set of origin-destination pairs, we aim to compute the utilization of every vehicle in the network. While it has been shown that considering unrestricted transfers can significantly improve journeys, computing such journeys efficiently remains algorithmically challenging. Since traffic assignments require the computation of millions of shortest paths, using a multi-modal network has previously not been feasible. A recently proposed approach (ULTRA) enables efficient algorithms with UnLimited TRAnsfers at the cost of a short preprocessing phase. In this work we combine the ULTRA approach with a state-of-the-art assignment algorithm, making multi-modal assignments practical. Careful algorithm engineering results in a new public transit traffic assignment algorithm that even outperforms the algorithm it builds upon, while enabling unlimited walking which has not been considered previously. We conclude our work with an extensive evaluation of the algorithm, showing its versatility and efficiency. On our real world instance, the algorithm computes over 15 million unique journeys in less than 17 seconds.

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arXiv2019

Evaluation of a Flow-Based Hypergraph Bipartitioning Algorithm

In this paper, we propose HyperFlowCutter, an algorithm for balanced hypergraph bipartitioning. It is based on minimum S-T hyperedge cuts and maximum flows. It computes a sequence of bipartitions that optimize cut size and balance in the Pareto sense, being able to trade one for the other. HyperFlowCutter builds on the FlowCutter algorithm for partitioning graphs. We propose additional features, such as handling disconnected hypergraphs, novel methods for obtaining starting S,T pairs as well as an approach to refine a given partition with HyperFlowCutter. Our main contribution is ReBaHFC, a new algorithm which obtains an initial partition with the fast multilevel hypergraph partitioner PaToH and then improves it using HyperFlowCutter as a refinement algorithm. ReBaHFC is able to significantly improve the solution quality of PaToH at little additional running time. The solution quality is only marginally worse than that of the best-performing hypergraph partitioners KaHyPar and hMETIS, while being one order of magnitude faster. Thus ReBaHFC offers a new time-quality trade-off in the current spectrum of hypergraph partitioners. For the special case of perfectly balanced bipartitioning, only the much slower plain HyperFlowCutter yields slightly better solutions than ReBaHFC, while only PaToH is faster than ReBaHFC.

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arXiv2019

Faster and Better Nested Dissection Orders for Customizable Contraction Hierarchies

Graph partitioning has many applications. We consider the acceleration of shortest path queries in road networks using Customizable Contraction Hierarchies (CCH). It is based on computing a nested dissection order by recursively dividing the road network into parts. Recently, with FlowCutter and Inertial Flow, two flow-based graph bipartitioning algorithms have been proposed for road networks. While FlowCutter achieves high-quality results and thus fast query times, it is rather slow. Inertial Flow is particularly fast due to the use of geographical information while still achieving decent query times. We combine the techniques of both algorithms to achieve more than six times faster preprocessing times than FlowCutter and even faster queries on the Europe road network. We show that using 16 cores of a shared-memory machine, this preprocessing needs four minutes.

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arXiv2018

Parallel and I/O-efficient Randomisation of Massive Networks using Global Curveball Trades

Graph randomisation is a crucial task in the analysis and synthesis of networks. It is typically implemented as an edge switching process (ESMC) repeatedly swapping the nodes of random edge pairs while maintaining the degrees involved. Curveball is a novel approach that instead considers the whole neighbourhoods of randomly drawn node pairs. Its Markov chain converges to a uniform distribution, and experiments suggest that it requires less steps than the established ESMC. Since trades however are more expensive, we study Curveball's practical runtime by introducing the first efficient Curveball algorithms: the I/O-efficient EM-CB for simple undirected graphs and its internal memory pendant IM-CB. Further, we investigate global trades processing every node in a graph during a single super step, and show that undirected global trades converge to a uniform distribution and perform superior in practice. We then discuss EM-GCB and EM-PGCB for global trades and give experimental evidence that EM-PGCB achieves the quality of the state-of-the-art ESMC algorithm EM-ES nearly one order of magnitude faster.

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arXiv2018

Distributed Graph Clustering using Modularity and Map Equation

We study large-scale, distributed graph clustering. Given an undirected graph, our objective is to partition the nodes into disjoint sets called clusters. A cluster should contain many internal edges while being sparsely connected to other clusters. In the context of a social network, a cluster could be a group of friends. Modularity and map equation are established formalizations of this internally-dense-externally-sparse principle. We present two versions of a simple distributed algorithm to optimize both measures. They are based on Thrill, a distributed big data processing framework that implements an extended MapReduce model. The algorithms for the two measures, DSLM-Mod and DSLM-Map, differ only slightly. Adapting them for similar quality measures is straight-forward. We conduct an extensive experimental study on real-world graphs and on synthetic benchmark graphs with up to 68 billion edges. Our algorithms are fast while detecting clusterings similar to those detected by other sequential, parallel and distributed clustering algorithms. Compared to the distributed GossipMap algorithm, DSLM-Map needs less memory, is up to an order of magnitude faster and achieves better quality.

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