The non-stop disjoint trajectories problem

Abstract

Consider an undirected network with traversal times on its edges and a set of commodities with connection requests from sources to destinations and release dates. The non-stop disjoint trajectories problem is to find trajectories that fulfill all requests, such that the commodities never meet. In this extension to the $\mathrm{NP}$-complete disjoint paths problem, trajectories must satisfy a non-stop condition, which disallows waiting at vertices or along arcs. This problem variant appears, for example, when disjoint aircraft trajectories shall be determined or in bufferless packet routing. We study the border of tractability for feasibility and optimization problems on three graph classes that are frequently used where space and time are discretized simultaneously: the path, the grid, and the mesh. We show that if all commodities have a common release date, feasibility can be decided in polynomial time on paths. For the unbounded mesh and unit-costs, we show how to construct optimal trajectories. In contrast, if commodities have individual release intervals and turns are forbidden, then even feasibility is $\mathrm{NP}$-complete for the path. For the mesh and arbitrary edge costs, with individual release dates and turning abilities of commodities restricted to at most 90°, we show that optimization and approximation are not fixed-parameter tractable.