The longest common subsequence (LCS) problem is one of the fundamental problems in string algorithms. A constrained version, the repetitionfree longest common subsequence (RFLCS) problem, additionally requires that each character may appear at most once in the solution sequence. In sharp contrast to LCS, RFLCS is NP-hard and even APX-hard. Previous work has shown that multivalued decision diagrams (MDDs) provide an effective tool for solving the RFLCS problem to optimality.

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Representing a polygon using a set of simple shapes has numerous applications in different use-case scenarios. We consider the problem of covering the interior of a rectilinear polygon with holes by a set of area-weighted, axis-aligned rectangles such that the total weight of the rectangles in the cover is minimized. Already the unit-weight case is known to be NP-hard and the general problem has, to the best of our knowledge, not been studied experimentally before.

Expander decompositions of graphs have significantly advanced the understanding of many classical graph problems and led to numerous fundamental theoretical results. However, their adoption in practice has been hindered due to their inherent intricacies and large hidden factors in their asymptotic running times. Here, we introduce the first practically efficient algorithm for computing expander decompositions and their hierarchies and demonstrate its effectiveness and utility by incorporating it as the core component in a novel solver for the normalized cut graph clustering objective.

Emerging reconfigurable datacenters allow to dynamically adjust the network topology in a demand-aware manner. These datacenters rely on optical switches which can be reconfigured to provide direct connectivity between racks, in the form of edge-disjoint matchings. While state-of-the-art optical switches in principle support microsecond reconfigurations, the demand-aware topology optimization constitutes a bottleneck.This paper proposes a dynamic algorithms approach to improve the performance of reconfigurable datacenter networks, by supporting faster reactions to changes in the traffic demand. This approach leverages the temporal locality of traffic patterns in order to update the interconnecting matchings incrementally, rather than recomputing them from scratch. In particular, we present six (batch-)dynamic algorithms and compare them to static ones. We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation on 176 synthetic and 39 real-world traces, and find that dynamic algorithms can both significantly improve the running time and reduce the number of changes to the configuration, especially in networks with high temporal locality, while retaining matching weight.

We design a framework for assisted normative reasoning based on Aristotelian diagrams and algorithmic graph theory which can be employed to address heterogeneous tasks of deductive reasoning. Here we focus on two problems of normative determination: we show that the algorithms used to address these problems are computationally efficient and their operations are traceable by humans. Finally, we discuss an application of our framework to a scenario regulated by the GDPR.

Reconfigurable optical topologies promise to improve the performance in datacenters by dynamically optimizing the physical network in a demand-aware manner. State-of-the-art optical technologies allow to establish and update direct connectivity (in the form of edge-disjoint matchings) between top-of-rack switches within microseconds or less. However, to fully exploit temporal structure in the demand, such fine-grained reconfigurations also require fast algorithms for optimizing the interconnecting matchings.Motivated by the desire to offload a maximum amount of demand to the reconfigurable network, this paper initiates the study of fast algorithms to find k disjoint heavy matchings in graphs. We present and analyze six algorithms, based on iterative matchings, b-matching, edge coloring, and node-rankings. We show that the problem is generally ${\mathcal{N}}{\mathcal{P}}{\text{ - hard}}$ and study the achievable approximation ratios.An extensive empirical evaluation of our algorithms on both real-world and synthetic traces (88 in total), including traces collected in Facebook datacenters and in HPC clusters reveals that all our algorithms provide high-quality matchings, and also very fast ones come within 95 % or more of the best solution. However, the running times differ significantly and what is the best algorithm depends on k and the acceptable runtime-quality tradeoff.

One of the most fundamental problems in computer science is the reachability problem: Given a directed graph and two vertices s and t, can s reach t via a path? We revisit existing techniques and combine them with new approaches to support a large portion of reachability queries in constant time using a linear-sized reachability index. Our new algorithm O'Reach can be easily combined with previously developed solutions for the problem or run standalone. In a detailed experimental study, we compare a variety of algorithms with respect to their index-building and query times as well as their memory footprint on a diverse set of instances. Our experiments indicate that the query performance often depends strongly not only on the type of graph, but also on the result, i.e., reachable or unreachable. Furthermore, we show that previous algorithms are significantly sped up when combined with our new approach in almost all scenarios. Surprisingly, due to cache effects, a higher investment in space doesn't necessarily pay off: Reachability queries can often be answered even faster than single memory accesses in a precomputed full reachability matrix.

Given a directed graph and a source vertex, the fully dynamic single-source reachability problem is to maintain the set of vertices that are reachable from the given vertex, subject to edge deletions and insertions. It is one of the most fundamental problems on graphs and appears directly or indirectly in many and varied applications. While there has been theoretical work on this problem, showing both linear conditional lower bounds for the fully dynamic problem and insertions-only and deletions-only upper bounds beating these conditional lower bounds, there has been no experimental study that compares the performance of fully dynamic reachability algorithms in practice. Previous experimental studies in this area concentrated only on the more general all-pairs reachability or transitive closure problem and did not use real-world dynamic graphs. In this paper, we bridge this gap by empirically studying an extensive set of algorithms for the single-source reachability problem in the fully dynamic setting. In particular, we design several fully dynamic variants of well-known approaches to obtain and maintain reachability information with respect to a distinguished source. Moreover, we extend the existing insertions-only or deletions-only upper bounds into fully dynamic algorithms. Even though the worst-case time per operation of all the fully dynamic algorithms we evaluate is at least linear in the number of edges in the graph (as is to be expected given the conditional lower bounds) we show in our extensive experimental evaluation that their performance differs greatly, both on generated as well as on real-world instances.

The fully dynamic transitive closure problem asks to maintain reachability information in a directed graph between arbitrary pairs of vertices, while the graph undergoes a sequence of edge insertions and deletions. The problem has been thoroughly investigated in theory and many specialized algorithms for solving it have been proposed in the last decades. In two large studies [Frigioni ea, 2001; Krommidas and Zaroliagis, 2008], a number of these algorithms have been evaluated experimentally against simple static algorithms for graph traversal, showing the competitiveness and even superiority of the simple algorithms in practice, except for very dense random graphs or very high ratios of queries. A major drawback of those studies is that only small and mostly randomly generated graphs are considered. In this paper, we engineer new algorithms to maintain all-pairs reachability information which are simple and space-efficient. Moreover, we perform an extensive experimental evaluation on both generated and real-world instances that are several orders of magnitude larger than those in the previous studies. Our results indicate that our new algorithms outperform all state-of-the-art algorithms on all types of input considerably in practice.