The Floyd-Warshall Algorithm for Shortest Paths

The Floyd-Warshall algorithm [Flo62, Roy59, War62] is a classic dynamic programming algorithm to compute the length of all shortest paths between any two vertices in a graph (i.e. to solve the all-pairs shortest path problem, or APSP for short). Given a representation of the graph as a matrix of weights M , it computes another matrix M ′ which represents a graph with the same path lengths and contains the length of the shortest path between any two vertices i and j. This is only possible if the graph does not contain any negative cycles. However, in this case the Floyd-Warshall algorithm will detect the situation by calculating a negative diagonal entry. This entry includes a formalization of the algorithm and of these key properties. The algorithm is refined to an efficient imperative version using the Imperative Refinement Framework.