Non-Crossing Shortest Paths in Undirected Unweighted Planar Graphs in Linear Time

Abstract

Given a set of well-formed terminal pairs on the external face of an undirected planar graph with unit edge weights, we give a linear-time algorithm for computing the union of non-crossing shortest paths joining each terminal pair, where well-formed means that such a set of non-crossing paths exists. This allows us to compute distances between each terminal pair, within the same time bound. We also give a novel concept of incremental shortest path subgraph of a planar graph, i.e., a partition of the planar embedding in subregions that preserve distances, that can be of interest itself.