Dynamic And Historical Shortest-Path Distance Queries On Large Evolving Networks By Pruned Landmark Labeling

We propose two dynamic indexing schemes for shortest-path and distance queries on large time-evolving graphs, which are useful in a wide range of important applications such as real-time network-aware search and network evolution analysis. To the best of our knowledge, these methods are the first practical exact indexing methods to efficiently process distance queries and dynamic graph updates.We first propose a dynamic indexing scheme for queries on the last snapshot. The scalability and efficiency of its offline indexing algorithm and query algorithm are competitive even with previous static methods. Meanwhile, the method is dynamic, that is, it can incrementally update indices as the graph changes over time. Then, we further design another dynamic indexing scheme that can also answer two kinds of historical queries with regard to not only the latest snapshot but also previous snapshots.Through extensive experiments on real and synthetic evolving networks, we show the scalability and efficiency of our methods. Specifically, they can construct indices from large graphs with millions of vertices, answer queries in microseconds, and update indices in milliseconds.