An experimental study of algorithms for fully dynamic transitive closure

Abstract

We have conducted an extensive experimental study on algorithms for fully dynamic transitive closure. We have implemented the recent fully dynamic algorithms by King [1999], Roditty [2003], Roditty and Zwick [2002, 2004], and Demetrescu and Italiano [2000, 2005] along with several variants and compared them to pseudo fully dynamic and simple-minded algorithms developed in a previous study [Frigioni et al. 2001]. We tested and compared these implementations on random inputs, synthetic (worst-case) inputs, and on inputs motivated by real-world graphs. Our experiments reveal that some of the dynamic algorithms can really be of practical value in many situations.