The OPTNET Procedure

The transitive closure of a graph is a graph such that for all there is a link if and only if there exists a path from to in .

The transitive closure of a graph can help to efficiently answer questions about reachability. Suppose you want to answer the question of whether you can get from node to node in the original graph . Given the transitive closure of , you can simply check for the existence of link to answer the question. This has many applications, including speeding up the processing of structured query languages, which are often used in databases.

In PROC OPTNET, the transitive closure algorithm can be invoked by using the TRANSITIVE_CLOSURE statement. The options for this statement are described in the section TRANSITIVE_CLOSURE Statement.

The results for the transitive closure algorithm are written to the output data set that is specified in the OUT= option in the TRANSITIVE_CLOSURE statement. The links that define the transitive closure are listed in the output data set with variable names from and to.

The transitive closure algorithm reports status information in a macro variable called _OROPTNET_TRANSCL_. See the section Macro Variable _OROPTNET_TRANSCL_ for more information about this macro variable.

The algorithm used by PROC OPTNET to compute transitive closure is a sparse version of the Floyd-Warshall algorithm (Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest 1990). This algorithm runs in time and therefore might not scale to very large graphs.

Transitive Closure of a Simple Directed Graph

This example illustrates the use of the transitive closure algorithm on the simple directed graph shown in Figure 2.56.

Figure 2.56: A Simple Directed Graph

The directed graph can be represented by the links data set LinkSetIn as follows:

data LinkSetIn;
   input from $ to $ @@;
   datalines;
B C  B D  C B  D A  D C
;

The following statements calculate the transitive closure and output the results in the data set TransClosure:

proc optnet
   graph_direction = directed
   data_links      = LinkSetIn;
   transitive_closure
      out          = TransClosure;
run;

The data set TransClosure contains the transitive closure of and is shown in Figure 2.57.

Figure 2.57: Transitive Closure of a Simple Directed Graph

Transitive Closure

from	to
B	C
B	D
C	B
D	A
D	C
C	C
C	D
B	B
D	B
D	D
B	A
C	A

The transitive closure of is shown graphically in Figure 2.58.

Figure 2.58: Transitive Closure of

For a more detailed example, see Example 2.6.