On the Universal Near Shortest Simple Paths Problem Luca E. Sch¨afer∗, Andrea Maier, Stefan Ruzika Department of Mathematics, Technische Universit¨at Kaiserslautern, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany Abstract This article generalizes the Near Shortest Paths Problem introduced by Byers and Waterman in 1984 using concepts of the Universal Shortest Path Prob- lem established by Turner and Hamacher in 2011. The generalization covers a variety of shortest path problems by introducing a universal weight vector. We apply this concept to the Near Shortest Paths Problem in a way that we are able to enumerate all universal near shortest simple paths. We present two recursive algorithms to compute the set of universal near shortest simple paths between two prespecified vertices and evaluate the running time com- plexity per path enumerated with respect to different values of the universal weight vector. Further, we study the cardinality of a minimal complete set with respect to different values of the universal weight vector. Keywords: Near shortest Paths, Dynamic Programming, Universal Shortest Path, Complexity, Enumeration 1. Introduction The K-shortest path problem is a well-studied generalization of the shortest path problem, where one aims to determine not only the shortest path, but arXiv:1906.05101v2 [math.CO] 23 Aug 2019 also the K shortest paths (K > 1) between a source vertex s and a sink vertex t. In contrast to the K-shortest path problem and its applications, (cf. [2, 7, 14, 24]), the near shortest paths problem, i.e., NSPP, received fewer attention in the literature, (cf. [3, 4, 23]). The NSPP aims to enumerate all ∗Corresponding author Email addresses:
[email protected] (Luca E.