RV COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING®

(Autonomous Institution affiliated to VTU, Belagavi)

APPLICATION OF GRAPH THEORY IN

TRANSPORTATION PROBLEM

NAME: UDBHAV VIKAS USN:1RV17EC175

NIMISH GOEL 1RV17EE033

Faculty coordinator: Dr.Vishalakshi Prabhu H

Designation: Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science Engineering
RV College of Engineering
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 Introduction

• The graph theory networks have always been important in

transportation and telecommunication.
• In solving problems in transportation networks Graph theory in
mathematics is a fundamental tool.
• Graphs are used to model situation in which a commodity is
transported from one location to another.
• A common example is the water supply, where the pipelines are
edge, vertices represent water users, pipe joins and so on.
• Highway systems can be thought of as transporting cars. In many
examples it is natural interpret some or all edges as directed.

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 STUDY PROBLEMS
1.One way street problem: Robin’s Theorem

• The first problem we consider has to do with movement of traffic.

• It has sometimes been argued that making certain streets one-way would
move traffic more efficiently.
• Let us begin with the simplified problem where every street is currently
two-way and it is desired to make every street one-way in the future.
• We can formulate this problem graph theoretically by taking the street
corners as the vertices of a graph. And drawing an edge between two
street corners if only if these corners are currently joined by a two-way
street.
• We wish to place a direction on each edge of this graph,It is possible to go
from any place to any other place.

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 2.Chinese Postman’s Problem

• In 1962, A Chinese mathematician called Kuan Mei-ko was

interested in a postman delivering mail to a number of
streets.
• Such that the total distance walked by the postman was as
short possible.
Chinese postman algorithm : An algorithm for finding an
optimal Chinese postman route is.
Step 1 :- List all odd vertices.
Step 2 :- List all possible paring of odd vertices.
Step 3 :- For each pairing find the edges that connect the
vertices with the minimum weight.
Step 4 :- Find the pairing such that the sum of the weights is
minimized.
Date/month/year
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Step 5 :- On the original graph add the edges that have been
found in step 4.
Step 6 :- The length of an optimal Chinese postman route is
the sum of all the edges added to the total found in step 4.
Step 7 :- A route corresponding to this minimum weight can
then be easily found.
 Following example: - A postman has to start at A, walk along
all 13 streets and return to A. The numbers on each edge
represent the Length, in meters, of each street. The problem
is to find a train that uses all the edges of a graph with
minimum Length .

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Step 01:- the odd vertices are A and H.
Step 02:- there is only one way of pairing these odd vertices
namely AH.
Step 03:- the shortest way of joining A to H is using the path
AB, BF, FH a total length of 160.
Step 04:- these edges on to the original network in this fig.
Step 05:- the length of the optimal Chinese postman route is
the sum of all the edges in the original network. Which is
840 mtr Plus the answer found in step 4, which is 160 mtr.,
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Hence the length of the optimal Chinese postman route is
100 mtr.
Step 06:- one possible route corresponding to this length is
ADCGHCABDFBEFHFBA, but many other possible routes
of the sum minimum length can be found.

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 3.Konigsberg bridge problem

• The town of Konigsberg had seven bridges and its people wanted
to know if one could start at some point, cross bridge exactly
once and return to the starting point.
• L. Euler whose name has been credited for solving this problem
translated it into graph theory problem.

→ →

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• Euler's argument shows that a necessary condition for the
walk of the desired form is that the graph be connected and
have exactly zero or two nodes of odd degree.
• This condition turns out also to be sufficient—a result stated
by Euler and later proved by Carl Hierholzer. Such a walk is
now called an Eulerian path.

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 4.Travelling Salesman Problem

• The Travelling Salesman Problem describes a salesman who

must travel between N cities.
• The order in which he does so is something he does not care
about, as long as he visits each once during his trip, and finishes
where he was at first.

First we can still represent graphs with matrixes. If the vertex set
is v = { 1, 2, 3,…………n}, put with the weighted adjacency matrix A
= ( wij )ij

San Francisco and Los Angeles draw the weighted graph. Some
approximate road distances among four city New York, Oklahoma
city.
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 SF 2930 NY

1660 1430

LA

1430 OKG

The weighted between two cities is and approximates road distance. We did not
include an edge between LA and NY because going through OKG is approximately the
shortest way to get from LA to NY. The weighted adjacency matrix with respect to the
vertex ordering { NY, OKG, SF, LA} is

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 0 1480 2930 0
1480 0 1660 1340
A= 2930 1660 0 390
0 1340 390 0

Path are define the same way for weighted graph as for unweighted graphs,
expect now one might define the length of the path to be sum of the weighted of
the edges. To avoid confusion of terminology, we won’t use the word length for
weighted paths. Bu we’ll use the word cost. That is ƴ a path is G represented by a
sequence of edges (e1, e2,e3………..ek), then the cost of ƴ is ∑ (ei) for instance in
our example above the cost or path from LA to NY given by (LA, OKL, NY) is 1340
+ 1480 = 2820. If G = (V, E, w) is a weighted graph where we assign each edge
weight. The cost is the same as our definition of length for the unweighted graph
(V, E), indeed, we can view the theory of graphs as a special case of the theory of
weighted graphs where all edges have weight degree.

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 CONCLUSION

• The main aim of this presentation is to present the importance

of graph theoretical idea in transportation networks.
• A Transportation Problems especially to project the idea of
graph theory.
• Various case studies and algorithms related to graph was
discussed.
• There are various way in which graph theory can be used in
real life transportation problems.

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 REFERENCES
• Bondy J.A. and U.S.R. Murty, graph theory with applications
MacMillan London.
• Application of graph theory of computer science an overview by S.
G. Shrinivas, S. Vetrivel and Dr. N.M. Elango. (International journal
of engineering science and technology vol. 2 2010.4610-4621.
• Application of graph theory in communication networks by Suman
Deswal and Anita Singhrova.
• International journal of Application of Application or innovation in
Engineering and Management Volume 1, issue 2 And October 2012.
• ORE, O, theory of graphs American mathematical society
providence R.I. 1962.
• Graph theory with application to engineering and computer science
Narshing Deo.

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