Floyd–Warshall algorithm

In computer science, the Floyd–Warshall algorithm (also

known as Floyd's algorithm, the Roy–Warshall Floyd–Warshall algorithm
algorithm, the Roy–Floyd algorithm, or the WFI Class All-pairs shortest
algorithm) is an algorithm for finding shortest paths in a path problem (for
directed weighted graph with positive or negative edge weights weighted graphs)
(but with no negative cycles).[1][2] A single execution of the
Data structure Graph
algorithm will find the lengths (summed weights) of shortest
paths between all pairs of vertices. Although it does not return Worst-case
details of the paths themselves, it is possible to reconstruct the performance
paths with simple modifications to the algorithm. Versions of Best-case
the algorithm can also be used for finding the transitive performance
closure of a relation , or (in connection with the Schulze
voting system) widest paths between all pairs of vertices in a Average
weighted graph. performance
Worst-case
space
Contents complexity

History and naming

Algorithm
Example
Behavior with negative cycles
Path reconstruction
Pseudocode [11]
Time analysis
Applications and generalizations
Implementations
Comparison with other shortest path algorithms
References
External links

History and naming

The Floyd–Warshall algorithm is an example of dynamic programming, and was published in its
currently recognized form by Robert Floyd in 1962.[3] However, it is essentially the same as
algorithms previously published by Bernard Roy in 1959[4] and also by Stephen Warshall in
1962[5] for finding the transitive closure of a graph,[6] and is closely related to Kleene's algorithm
(published in 1956) for converting a deterministic finite automaton into a regular expression.[7]
The modern formulation of the algorithm as three nested for-loops was first described by Peter
Ingerman, also in 1962.[8]

Algorithm
The Floyd–Warshall algorithm compares all possible paths through the graph between each pair of
vertices. It is able to do this with comparisons in a graph, even though there may be up to
edges in the graph, and every combination of edges is tested. It does so by incrementally
improving an estimate on the shortest path between two vertices, until the estimate is optimal.

Consider a graph with vertices numbered 1 through  . Further consider a function

that returns the length of the shortest possible path (if one exists) from to
using vertices only from the set as intermediate points along the way. Now, given this
function, our goal is to find the length of the shortest path from each to each using any vertex in
. By definition, this is the value , which we will find
recursively.

Observe that must be less than or equal to : we

have more flexibility if we are allowed to use the vertex . If is in fact less
than , then there must be a path from to using the vertices
that is shorter than any such path that does not use the vertex . This path can be
decomposed as:

(1) a path from to that uses the vertices , followed by

(2) a path from to that uses the vertices .

And of course, these much be the shortest such paths, otherwise we could further decrease the
length. In other words, we have arrived at the recursive formula:

Meanwhile, the base case is given by

where denotes the weight of the edge from to if one exists and ∞ (infinity) otherwise.

These formulas are the heart of the Floyd–Warshall algorithm. The algorithm works by first
computing for all pairs for , then , then , and so on.
This process continues until , and we have found the shortest path for all pairs using
any intermediate vertices. Pseudocode for this basic version follows:

let dist be a |V| × |V| array of minimum distances initialized to ∞ (infinity)

for each edge (u, v) do
dist[u][v] ← w(u, v) // The weight of the edge (u, v)
 for each vertex v do
dist[v][v] ← 0
for k from 1 to |V|
for i from 1 to |V|
for j from 1 to |V|
if dist[i][j] > dist[i][k] + dist[k][j]
dist[i][j] ← dist[i][k] + dist[k][j]
end if

Example
The algorithm above is executed on the graph on the left below:

Prior to the first recursion of the outer loop, labeled k = 0 above, the only known paths correspond
to the single edges in the graph. At k = 1, paths that go through the vertex 1 are found: in
particular, the path [2,1,3] is found, replacing the path [2,3] which has fewer edges but is longer
(in terms of weight). At k = 2, paths going through the vertices {1,2} are found. The red and blue
boxes show how the path [4,2,1,3] is assembled from the two known paths [4,2] and [2,1,3]
encountered in previous iterations, with 2 in the intersection. The path [4,2,3] is not considered,
because [2,1,3] is the shortest path encountered so far from 2 to 3. At k = 3, paths going through
the vertices {1,2,3} are found. Finally, at k = 4, all shortest paths are found.

The distance matrix at each iteration of k, with the updated distances in bold, will be:

j j j
k=0 k=1 k=2
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

1 0 ∞ −2 ∞ 1 0 ∞ −2 ∞ 1 0 ∞ −2 ∞

2 4 0 3 ∞ 2 4 0 2 ∞ 2 4 0 2 ∞
i i i
3 ∞ ∞ 0 2 3 ∞ ∞ 0 2 3 ∞ ∞ 0 2

4 ∞ −1 ∞ 0 4 ∞ −1 ∞ 0 4 3 −1 1 0
 j j
k=3 k=4
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

1 0 ∞ −2 0 1 0 −1 −2 0

2 4 0 2 4 2 4 0 2 4
i i
3 ∞ ∞ 0 2 3 5 1 0 2
4 3 −1 1 0 4 3 −1 1 0

Behavior with negative cycles

A negative cycle is a cycle whose edges sum to a negative value. There is no shortest path between
any pair of vertices , which form part of a negative cycle, because path-lengths from to can be
arbitrarily small (negative). For numerically meaningful output, the Floyd–Warshall algorithm
assumes that there are no negative cycles. Nevertheless, if there are negative cycles, the Floyd–
Warshall algorithm can be used to detect them. The intuition is as follows:

The Floyd–Warshall algorithm iteratively revises path lengths between all pairs of vertices
, including where ;
Initially, the length of the path is zero;
A path can only improve upon this if it has length less than zero, i.e. denotes a
negative cycle;
Thus, after the algorithm, will be negative if there exists a negative-length path from
back to .

Hence, to detect negative cycles using the Floyd–Warshall algorithm, one can inspect the diagonal
of the path matrix, and the presence of a negative number indicates that the graph contains at least
one negative cycle.[9] During the execution of the algorithm, if there is a negative cycle,
exponentially large numbers can appear, as large as , where is the largest
absolute value of a negative edge in the graph. To avoid overflow/underflow problems one should
check for negative numbers on the diagonal of the path matrix within the inner for loop of the
algorithm.[10] Obviously, in an undirected graph a negative edge creates a negative cycle (i.e., a
closed walk) involving its incident vertices. Considering all edges of the above example graph as
undirected, e.g. the vertex sequence 4 – 2 – 4 is a cycle with weight sum −2.

Path reconstruction
The Floyd–Warshall algorithm typically only provides the lengths of the paths between all pairs of
vertices. With simple modifications, it is possible to create a method to reconstruct the actual path
between any two endpoint vertices. While one may be inclined to store the actual path from each
vertex to each other vertex, this is not necessary, and in fact, is very costly in terms of memory.
Instead, the shortest-path tree can be calculated for each node in time using
memory to store each tree which allows us to efficiently reconstruct a path from any two connected
vertices.

Pseudocode [11]

let dist be a array of minimum distances initialized to (infinity)

let next be a array of vertex indices initialized to null

procedure FloydWarshallWithPathReconstruction() is
for each edge (u, v) do
dist[u][v] ← w(u, v) // The weight of the edge (u, v)
next[u][v] ← v
for each vertex v do
dist[v][v] ← 0
next[v][v] ← v
for k from 1 to |V| do // standard Floyd-Warshall implementation
for i from 1 to |V|
for j from 1 to |V|
if dist[i][j] > dist[i][k] + dist[k][j] then
dist[i][j] ← dist[i][k] + dist[k][j]
next[i][j] ← next[i][k]

procedure Path(u, v)
if next[u][v] = null then
return []
path ← [u]
while u ≠ v
u ← next[u][v]
path.append(u)
return path

Time analysis
Let be , the number of vertices. To find all of (for all and ) from
those of requires operations. Since we begin with
and compute the sequence of matrices
, , , , the total number of
operations used is . Therefore, the complexity of the algorithm is .

Applications and generalizations

The Floyd–Warshall algorithm can be used to solve the following problems, among others:

Shortest paths in directed graphs (Floyd's algorithm).

Transitive closure of directed graphs (Warshall's algorithm). In Warshall's original formulation
of the algorithm, the graph is unweighted and represented by a Boolean adjacency matrix.
Then the addition operation is replaced by logical conjunction (AND) and the minimum
operation by logical disjunction (OR).
Finding a regular expression denoting the regular language accepted by a finite automaton
(Kleene's algorithm, a closely related generalization of the Floyd–Warshall algorithm)[12]
Inversion of real matrices (Gauss–Jordan algorithm) [13]
Optimal routing. In this application one is interested in finding the path with the maximum flow
between two vertices. This means that, rather than taking minima as in the pseudocode above,
one instead takes maxima. The edge weights represent fixed constraints on flow. Path weights
represent bottlenecks; so the addition operation above is replaced by the minimum operation.
 Fast computation of Pathfinder networks.
Widest paths/Maximum bandwidth paths
Computing canonical form of difference bound matrices (DBMs)
Computing the similarity between graphs
Transitive closure in AND/OR/threshold graphs.[14]

Implementations
Implementations are available for many programming languages.

For C++, in the boost::graph (http://www.boost.org/libs/graph/doc/) library

For C#, at QuickGraph (http://www.codeplex.com/quickgraph)
For C#, at QuickGraphPCL (https://www.nuget.org/packages/QuickGraphPCL/3.6.61114.2) (A
fork of QuickGraph with better compatibility with projects using Portable Class Libraries.)
For Java, in the Apache Commons Graph (http://commons.apache.org/sandbox/commons-gra
ph/) library
For JavaScript, in the Cytoscape library
For Julia, in the Graphs.jl (https://docs.juliahub.com/Graphs/VJ6vx/1.7.0/algorithms/shortestpat
hs/#Graphs.floyd_warshall_shortest_paths-Union{Tuple{AbstractGraph{U}},%20Tuple{T},%20
Tuple{U},%20Tuple{AbstractGraph{U},%20AbstractMatrix{T}}}%20where%20{U%3C:Integer,%
20T%3C:Real}) package
For MATLAB, in the Matlab_bgl (http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/10922)
package
For Perl, in the Graph (https://metacpan.org/module/Graph) module
For Python, in the SciPy library (module scipy.sparse.csgraph (http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/r
eference/generated/scipy.sparse.csgraph.floyd_warshall.html#scipy.sparse.csgraph.floyd_war
shall)) or NetworkX library
For R, in packages e1071 (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/e1071/index.html) and
Rfast (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Rfast/index.html)

Comparison with other shortest path algorithms

The Floyd–Warshall algorithm is a good choice for computing paths between all pairs of vertices in
dense graphs, in which most or all pairs of vertices are connected by edges. For sparse graphs with
non-negative edge weights, lower asymptotic complexity can be obtained by running Dijkstra's
algorithm from each possible starting vertex, since the worst-case running time of repeated
Dijkstra ( using Fibonacci heaps) is smaller than the running
time of the Floyd–Warshall algorithm when is significantly smaller than . For sparse
graphs with negative edges but no negative cycles, Johnson's algorithm can be used, with the same
asymptotic running time as the repeated Dijkstra approach.

There are also known algorithms using fast matrix multiplication to speed up all-pairs shortest
path computation in dense graphs, but these typically make extra assumptions on the edge weights
(such as requiring them to be small integers).[15][16] In addition, because of the high constant
factors in their running time, they would only provide a speedup over the Floyd–Warshall
algorithm for very large graphs.

References
1. Cormen, Thomas H.; Leiserson, Charles E.; Rivest, Ronald L. (1990). Introduction to
 Algorithms (1st ed.). MIT Press and McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-262-03141-8. See in particular
Section 26.2, "The Floyd–Warshall algorithm", pp. 558–565 and Section 26.4, "A general
framework for solving path problems in directed graphs", pp. 570–576.
2. Kenneth H. Rosen (2003). Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications, 5th Edition. Addison
Wesley. ISBN 978-0-07-119881-3.
3. Floyd, Robert W. (June 1962). "Algorithm 97: Shortest Path". Communications of the ACM. 5
(6): 345. doi:10.1145/367766.368168 (https://doi.org/10.1145%2F367766.368168).
S2CID 2003382 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:2003382).
4. Roy, Bernard (1959). "Transitivité et connexité" (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3201c/f22
2.image). C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris (in French). 249: 216–218.
5. Warshall, Stephen (January 1962). "A theorem on Boolean matrices". Journal of the ACM. 9
(1): 11–12. doi:10.1145/321105.321107 (https://doi.org/10.1145%2F321105.321107).
S2CID 33763989 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:33763989).
6. Weisstein, Eric W. "Floyd-Warshall Algorithm" (https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Floyd-WarshallA
lgorithm.html). MathWorld.
7. Kleene, S. C. (1956). "Representation of events in nerve nets and finite automata". In C. E.
Shannon and J. McCarthy (ed.). Automata Studies. Princeton University Press. pp. 3–42.
8. Ingerman, Peter Z. (November 1962). "Algorithm 141: Path Matrix". Communications of the
ACM. 5 (11): 556. doi:10.1145/368996.369016 (https://doi.org/10.1145%2F368996.369016).
S2CID 29010500 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:29010500).
9. Hochbaum, Dorit (2014). "Section 8.9: Floyd-Warshall algorithm for all pairs shortest paths" (ht
tp://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~hochbaum/files/ieor266-2014.pdf) (PDF). Lecture Notes for IEOR
266: Graph Algorithms and Network Flows. Department of Industrial Engineering and
Operations Research, University of California, Berkeley.
10. Stefan Hougardy (April 2010). "The Floyd–Warshall algorithm on graphs with negative cycles".
Information Processing Letters. 110 (8–9): 279–281. doi:10.1016/j.ipl.2010.02.001 (https://doi.
org/10.1016%2Fj.ipl.2010.02.001).
11. "Free Algorithms Book" (https://books.goalkicker.com/AlgorithmsBook/).
12. Gross, Jonathan L.; Yellen, Jay (2003), Handbook of Graph Theory (https://books.google.com/
books?id=mKkIGIea_BkC&pg=PA65), Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications, CRC Press,
p. 65, ISBN 9780203490204.
13. Penaloza, Rafael. "Algebraic Structures for Transitive Closure". CiteSeerX 10.1.1.71.7650 (http
s://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.71.7650).
14. Gillies, Donald (1993). Scheduling Tasks with AND/OR precedence contraints (PhD Thesis,
Appendix B) (http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~gillies/download/Donald_W_Gillies_PhD_1993_Scheduli
ng_With_AND_OR_Precedence.pdf) (PDF) (Report).
15. Zwick, Uri (May 2002), "All pairs shortest paths using bridging sets and rectangular matrix
multiplication", Journal of the ACM, 49 (3): 289–317, arXiv:cs/0008011 (https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/
0008011), doi:10.1145/567112.567114 (https://doi.org/10.1145%2F567112.567114),
S2CID 1065901 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:1065901).
16. Chan, Timothy M. (January 2010), "More algorithms for all-pairs shortest paths in weighted
graphs", SIAM Journal on Computing, 39 (5): 2075–2089, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.153.6864 (https://c
iteseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.153.6864), doi:10.1137/08071990x (https://
doi.org/10.1137%2F08071990x).

External links
Interactive animation of the Floyd–Warshall algorithm (http://www.pms.informatik.uni-muenche
n.de/lehre/compgeometry/Gosper/shortest_path/shortest_path.html#visualization)
Interactive animation of the Floyd–Warshall algorithm (Technical University of Munich) (https://
algorithms.discrete.ma.tum.de/graph-algorithms/spp-floyd-warshall/index_en.html)
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