Comparison of Parallel and Serial Execution of Shortest Path Algorithms

Shortest Path Algorithms are an important set of algorithms in today’s world. It has many applications like Traffic Consultation, Route Finding, and Network Design. It is essential for these applications to be fast and efficient as they mostly require real-time execution. Sequential execution of shortest path algorithms for large graphs with many nodes is time-consuming. On the other hand, parallel execution can make these applications faster. In this paper, three popular shortest path algorithms - Dijkstra, Bellman-Ford, and Floyd Warshall - are both implemented as serial and parallel programs and tested on various problem sizes. The performance of these algorithms is evaluated by comparing their execution times. To achieve parallelization, the OpenMP (Open multiprocessing) framework is employed.