6.5: Eulerization and the Chinese Postman Problem
Not every graph has an Euler path or circuit, yet our lawn inspector still needs to do her inspections. Her goal is to minimize the amount of walking she has to do. In order to do that, she will have to duplicate some edges in the graph until an Euler circuit exists.
Eulerization is the process of adding edges to a graph to create an Euler circuit on a graph. To eulerize a graph, edges are duplicated to connect pairs of vertices with odd degree. Connecting two odd degree vertices increases the degree of each, giving them both even degree. When two odd degree vertices are not directly connected, we can duplicate all edges in a path connecting the two.
Note that we can only duplicate edges, not create edges where there wasn’t one before. Duplicating edges would mean walking or driving down a road twice, while creating an edge where there wasn’t one before is akin to installing a new road!
For the rectangular graph shown, three possible eulerizations are shown. Notice in each of these cases the vertices that started with odd degrees have even degrees after eulerization, allowing for an Euler circuit.
In the example above, you’ll notice that the last eulerization required duplicating seven edges, while the first two only required duplicating five edges. If we were eulerizing the graph to find a walking path, we would want the eulerization with minimal duplications. If the edges had weights representing distances or costs, then we would want to select the eulerization with the minimal total added weight.
Eulerize the graph shown, then find an Euler circuit on the eulerized graph.
- Answer
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This graph can be eulerized by duplicating the edge BC, as shown. One possible Euler circuit on the eulerized graph is ACDBCBA
Looking again at the graph for our lawn inspector from Examples 1 and 8, the vertices with odd degree are shown highlighted. With eight vertices, we will always have to duplicate at least four edges.
Solution
In this case, we need to duplicate five edges since two odd degree vertices are not directly connected. Without weights we can’t be certain this is the eulerization that minimizes walking distance, but it looks pretty good.
The problem of finding the optimal eulerization is called the Chinese Postman Problem, a name given by an American in honor of the Chinese mathematician Mei-Ko Kwan who first studied the problem in 1962 while trying to find optimal delivery routes for postal carriers. This problem is important in determining efficient routes for garbage trucks, school buses, parking meter checkers, street sweepers, and more.
Unfortunately, algorithms to solve this problem are fairly complex. Some simpler cases are considered in the exercises.