How to store a Euler graph struct? - algorithm

Question

I'm working around the Euler Path issue and found a problem:How to define or store a Euler graph struct?
An usual way is using an "Adjoint Matrix",C[i][j] is defined to store the edge between i-j.It's concise and effective！ But this kind of matrix is limited by the situation that the edge between 2 nodes is unique (figure 1).
class EulerPath
{
int[][] c;//adjoint matrix,c[i][j] means the edge between i and j
}
What if there are several edges (figure 2)?My solution might be using customized class ,like "Graph","Node","Edge" to store a graph,but dividing the graph into some discrete structs ,which means we have to take more class details into consideration,may hurt the efficiency and concision. So I'm very eager to hear your advice!Thanks a lot!
class EulerPath
{
class Graph
{
Node[] Nodes;
Edge[] Edges;
}
class Node{...}
class Edge{...}
}

Answer 1

You can use an adjacency matrix to store graphs with multi-edges. You just let the value of c[i][j] be the number of times that vertex i is adjacent to vertex j. In your first case, it's 1, in your second case, it's 3. See also Wikipedia -- adjacency matrices aren't defined as being composed of only 1 and 0, that's just the special case of an adjacency matrix for a simple graph.
EDIT: You can represent your second graph in an adjacency matrix like this:
1 2 3 4
1 0 3 1 1
2 3 0 1 1
3 1 1 0 0
4 1 1 0 0

Answer 2

You can do this in at least three ways:
Adjacency list
Meaning that you have a 2D array called al[N][N]
al[N][N] This N is the node index
al[N][N] This N is the neighbor node index
Example, a graph with this input:
0 => 1
1 => 2
2 => 3
3 => 1
The adjacency list will look like this:
0 [1]
1 [2,3]
2 [1,3]
3 [1,2]
PS: Since this is a 2D array, and not all horizontal cells are going to be used, you need to keep track of the number of connected neighbours for each graph index because some programming languages initialise array values with a zero which is a node index in the graph. This can be done easily by creating another array that will count the number of neighbours for each graph index. Example of this case: numLinks: [1,2,2,2]
Matrix
With a matrix, you create an N x N 2D array, and you put a 1 value in the intersection of row col neighobor nodes:
Example with the same input above:
0 1 2 3
0 0 1 0 0
1 1 0 1 1
2 0 1 0 1
3 0 1 1 0
Class Node
The last method is creating a class called Node that contain a dynamic array of type Node. And you can store in this array the other nodes connected

Answer 3

Consider using a vector of linked list. Add a class that will have a field for a Vertex as well as the Weight (let's name it Entry). Your weights should be preferably another vector or linked list (preferably ll) which will contain all possible weights to the according Vertex. Your main class will have a vector of vectors, or a vector of linked lists (I'd prefer linked lists since you will most likely not need random access, being forced to iterate through every Entry when performing any operation). You main class will have one more vector containing all vertices. In C++ this would look like this:
class Graph{
std::vector<std::forward_list<Entry>> adj_list;
std::vector<Vertex> vertices;
};
Where the Vertex that corresponds to vertices[i] has the corresponding list in adj_list[i]. Since every Entry contains the info regarding the Vertex to which you are connected and the according weights, you will have your graph represented by this class.

Answer 4

Efficiency for what type of operation?
If you want to find a route between two IP addresses on the internet, then your adjacency matrix might be a million nodes squared, ie a gigabyte of entries. And as finding all the nodes connected to a given node goes up as n, you could be looking at a million lookups per node just to find the nodes connected to that node. Horribly inefficient.
If your problem only involves a few nodes and is run infrequently, then adjacency matrices are simple and intuitive.
For most problems which involve traversing graphs, a better solution could be to create a class called node, which has a property a collection (say a List) of all the nodes it is connected to. For most real world applications, the list of connected nodes is much less than the total number of all nodes, so this works out as more compact. Plus it is highly efficient in finding edges - you can get a list of all connected nodes in fixed time per node.
If you use this structure, where you have a node class which contains as a property a collection of all the nodes it is connected to, then when you create a new edge (say between node A and node B) then you add B to the collection of nodes to which A is connected, and A to the collection of nodes to which B is connected. Excuse my Java/C#, something like
class Node{
Arraylist<Node> connectedNodes;
public Node() // initializer
{
connectedNodes = new ArrayList<Node>;
}
}
// and somewhere else you have this definition:
public addEdgeBetween(Node firstNode, Node secondNode) {
firstNode.connectedNodes.Add(secondNode);
secondNode.connectedNodes.Add(firstNode);
}
And similarly to delete an edge, remove the reference in A to B's collection and vice versa. There is no need to define a separate edge class, edges are implicit in the structure which cross-links the two nodes.
And that's about all you have to do to implement this structure, which is (for most real world problems) uses far less memory than an adjacency matrix, is much faster for large numbers of nodes for most problems, and is ultimately far more flexible.
Defining a node class also opens up a logical place to add enhancements of many sorts. For example, you might decide to generate for each node a list of all the nodes which are two steps away, because this improves path finding. You can easily add this in as another collection within the node class; this would be a pretty messy thing to do with adjacency matrices. You can obviously squeeze a lot more functionality into a class than a into a matrix of ints.
Your question concerning multiple links is unclear to me. If you want multiple edges between the same two points, then this can be accommodated in both ways of doing it. In adjacency matrices, simply have a number at that row and column which indicates the number of links. If you use a node class, just add each edge separately. Similarly directional graphs; an edge pointing from A to B has a reference to B in A's list of connected nodes, but B doesn't have A in its list.