On the Tractability of Shortest Path Problems in Weighted Edge-Coloured Graphs

A weighted edge-coloured graph is a graph for which each edge is assigned both a positive weight and a discrete colour, and can be used to model transportation and computer networks in which there are multiple transportation modes. In such a graph paths are compared by their total weight in each colour, resulting in a Pareto set of minimal paths from one vertex to another. This paper will give a tight upper bound on the cardinality of a minimal set of paths for any weighted edge-coloured graph. Additionally, a bound is presented on the expected number of minimal paths in weighted edge–bicoloured graphs. These bounds indicate that despite weighted edge-coloured graphs are theoretically intractable, amenability to computation is typically found in practice.