Data Structures and Algorithms
with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Java 
Floyd's algorithm uses the
dynamic programming method
to solve the all-pairs shortest-path problem on a dense graph.
The method makes efficient use of
an adjacency matrix to solve the problem.
Consider an edge-weighted graph 
,
where C(v,w) represents the weight on edge (v,w).
Suppose the vertices are numbered from 1 to 
.
That is, let 
.
Furthermore,
let 
be the set comprised of the first k vertices in 
.
That is, 
, for 
.
Let 
be the shortest path from vertex v to w
that passes only through vertices in ,
if such a path exists.
That is, the path has the form
Let 
be the length of path :
Since 
,
the 
paths are correspond to the edges of G:
Therefore, the 
path lengths correspond to the weights on the edges of G:
Floyd's algorithm computes the sequence of matrices
.
The distances in 
represent paths with intermediate vertices in 
.
Since 
,
we can obtain the distances in 
from those in
by considering only the paths that pass through vertex 
.
Figure 
illustrates how this is done.
Figure: Calculating in Floyd's algorithm.
For every pair of vertices (v,w),
we compare the distance 
,
(which represents the shortest path from v to w
that does not pass through )
with the sum 
(which represents the shortest path from v to w
that does pass through ).
Thus, is computed as follows:
Copyright © 1998 by Bruno R. Preiss, P.Eng. All rights reserved.