Stony Brook Algorithm Repository


Eulerian Cycle/Chinese Postman

Input
Output

Input Description: A graph \(G=(V,E)\).}
Problem: Find the shortest tour of \(G\) visiting each edge at least once.

Excerpt from The Algorithm Design Manual: Suppose you are given the map of a city and charged with designing the routes for garbage trucks, snow plows, or postmen. In all of these applications, every road in the city must be completely traversed at least once in order to ensure that all deliveries or pickups are made. For efficiency, you seek to minimize total drive time, or equivalently, the total distance or number of edges traversed.

Such applications are variants of the Eulerian cycle problem, best characterized by the children's puzzle that asks them to draw a given figure completely without lifting their pencil off the paper and without repeating any edges. We seek a path or cycle through a graph that visits each edge exactly once.


Implementations

GOBLIN (rating 10)
Prof Harold Thimbleby's The Chinese Postman Problem (rating 9)
chinese-postman (rating 5)
ChinesePostman (rating 5)
Nijenhuis and Wilf (rating 3)
Combinatorica (rating 3)


Recommended Books

An Introduction to Parallel Algorithms by Joseph Jaja Computational Discrete Mathematics: Combinatorics and Graph Theory with Mathematica by S. Pemmaraju and S. Skiena Introduction to Algorithms by U. Manber
Graph Algorithms by S. Even Combinatorial Optimization: Networks and Matroids by E. Lawler Graph Theory 1736-1936 by N. L. Biggs and E. K. Lloyd and R. J. Wilson
Graphical enumeration by F. Harary and E. Palmer Recreations Mathematiques by E. Lucas

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Hamiltonian Cycle

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