Shortest Path Problem
3 years later I’m back with a new article in my blog – time flies..
The Shortest Path Problem is a common problem to nearly anyone nowadays. Anyone who used a navigation system or Google Maps for finding the best route for the weekend trip has already sucessfully solved the shortest path problem.
A solution to the shortest path (in terms of distance, time or any arbitrary cost) is to find the best route from one point of a network (maybe a street network) to another.
In graph theory, the shortest path problem is the problem of finding a path between two vertices (or nodes) in a graph such that the sum of the weights of its constituent edges is minimized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortest_path_problem
There are several tools for solving this problem – even free of charge and on any platform. In the following article series I want to explore the usage and the performance of various graph libraries that offer a shortest path solver.
List of the packages I want to explore:
Google OR-Tools- LEMON Graph Library
- Boost Graph Library (BGL)
Note: I deleted Google OR-Tools from the list, because anything with Google OR-Tools was a mess:
- Installation first failed
(recent Ubuntu installation package does not work – „make third_party“ gives a „no rule defined for ‚third_party'“) - the API is too complicated (I found callbacks hard to understand in Javascript – I really don’t want to program with callbacks in C++