Question

I am converting a VB6 to C# and I want to make my data structure that holds values and relationships more efficient. In VB I have a collection of values and another collection of relationships between those values with priorities for those relationships. I also have an algorithm that when a set of values is passed to it all relationships required to join those values together is returned. For example, say the values collection contains 1-10 and the relationship collection contains

1,2
3,2
5,2
2,8
8,10
9,10

If the input was 1,9,10 the returned relationships would be —

1,2
2,8
8,10
9,10

Since there may be multiple paths the least amount of relationships would be returned but there is a caveat of relationship priorities. If a relationship has a higher priority then that relationship would be added and the rest of the relationships would be added from there. I am thinking of using a Disjoint-set data structure but I am not sure.

Any ideas?

More information —

The number of values would normally be less than 100 and the relationships less than 500. The collections are static and the algorithm will be used again and again to find paths. Also, I did not ask this but would the algorithm in Disjoint-set data structure be the most efficient?

Answer 1

It sounds like what you have is a Graph. This is a structure with Nodes and Edges. There are many many libraries and tools that deal with Graphs. Microsoft even put out a paper on how to deal with them. I think graphs are great and extremely useful in many situations.

One big benefit with graphs is the ability to assign priorities to the edges between the nodes. Then when you want to find the path between two nodes, boom, the graph can choose the path with the ideal priority.

In your situation, your values are the nodes and your relationships are the edges.