A Graph Search Heuristic for Shortest Distance Paths
Edmond Chow · University of North Texas Digital Library (University of North Texas) · 2005
This paper presents a heuristic for guiding A* search for finding the shortest distance path between two vertices in a connected, undirected, and explicitly stored graph. The heuristic requires a small amount of data to be stored at each vertex. The heuristic has application to quickly detecting relationships between two vertices in a large information or knowledge network. We compare the performance of this heuristic with breadth-first search on graphs with various topological properties. The results show that one or more orders of magnitude improvement in the number of vertices expanded is possible for large graphs, including Poisson random graphs.