Bicriteria Rectilinear Shortest Paths among Rectilinear Obstacles in the Plane

Given a rectilinear domain P of h pairwise-disjoint rectilinear obstacles with a total of n vertices in the plane, we study the problem of computing bicriteria rectilinear shortest paths between two points s and t in P. Three types of bicriteria rectilinear paths are considered: minimum-link shortest paths, shortest minimum-link paths, and minimum-cost paths where the cost of a path is a non-decreasing function of both the number of edges and the length of the path. The onepoint and two-point path queries are also considered. Algorithms for these problems have been given previously. Our contributions are threefold. First, we find a critical error in all previous algorithms. Second, we correct the error in a not-so-trivial way. Third, we further improve the algorithms so that they are even faster than the previous (incorrect) algorithms when h is relatively small. For example, for computing a minimum-link shortest s-t path, the previous algorithm runs in O(n log3/2 n) time while the time of our new algorithm is O(n+ h log3/2 h). 1998 ACM Subject Classification I.3.5 Computational Geometry and Object Modeling, F.2.2 Nonnumerical Algorithms and Problems