Answering exact distance queries on real-world graphs with bounded performance guarantees

The ability to efficiently obtain exact distance information from both directed and undirected graphs is desired by many real-world applications. In this work, we unified the query indexing efforts on directed and undirected graphs into one by proposing the TreeMap approach. Our approach has very tight bounds on query time, index size, and construction time for answering queries on both directed and undirected graphs. The query time complexity is close to constant for graphs with a small width of tree decomposition, and the index construction can be completed without materializing the distance matrix or other high-cost operations. In the empirical study, we demonstrated that the TreeMap approach in general performs much better than competitive methods in indexing real graphs for answering exact distance queries.