You are the mayor of a beautiful city by the ocean, and your city is connected to the mainland by a set of k bridges. Your city manager tells you that it is necessary to come up with an evacuation plan in the event of a hurricane. Your idea is to add a sign at each intersection pointing the direction of the route to the closest of the k bridges. You realize that this can be modeled as a graph problem, where the street intersections are nodes, the roads are edges, and the edge weights give the driving time between two adjacent intersections. Note that some of the roads in your city are one-way roads.
(a) Explain how to solve the evacuation-route problem in O(mlog n) time, where n is the number of intersections and m is the number of streets connecting two adjacent intersections. Note that the number of bridges k is not a constant, that is, it may depend on n and m. Therefore, a running time of O(k · mlog n) is not an acceptable solution. (Although I will give half credit for such a solution.) The output of your algorithm will be a labeling of the intersections, with an arrow pointing to the road to take to the closest bridge.
(b) Some of the bridges can hold more capacity than others. For 1 ≤ i ≤ k, we associate a positive numeric weight ci with each bridge. To encourage people to use bridges with higher capacity, we treat distances to different bridges differently. In particular, if δ is the actual distance from some intersection to bridge i, we assign it a capacity-weighted distance of δ/ci. Therefore, the higher the bridge capacity is, the lower the weighted distance. Present an O(mlog n) time algorithm to solve the evacuation-route problem using capacity-weighted distances. (Again, I will give half credit for a solution running in O(k · mlog n) time.
Problem 4 additional info: 2b - some of the bridges will be higher capacity. Their weights will be function of (distance/number of lanes) → this will give us shorter weight and we can treat it as a better route to take even though the distance is farther away.