An Efficient Algorithm for Enumerating all Minimal Paths of a Graph

Abstract

The enumeration of all minimal paths between a terminal pair of a given graph is widely used in a lot of applications such as network reliability assessment. In this paper, we present a new and efficient algorithm to generate all minimal paths in a graph G(V, E). The algorithm proposed builds the set of minimal paths gradually, starting from the source node s. We present two versions of our algorithm; the first version determines all feasible paths between a pair of terminals in a directed graph without cycle, and this version runs in linear time O(|V | + |E|). The second version determines all minimal paths in a general graph (directed and undirected graph). In order to show the process and the effectiveness of our method, an illustrative example is presented for each case.