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Graph with SCC marked

A directed graph is called strongly connected if there is a path from each vertex in the graph to every other vertex. In particular, this means paths in each direction; a path from a to b and also a path from b to a.

The strongly connected components (SCC) of a directed graph G are its maximal strongly connected subgraphs. If each strongly connected component is contracted to a single vertex, the resulting graph is a directed acyclic graph, the condensation of G. A directed graph is acyclic if and only if it has no (nontrivial) strongly connected subgraphs (because a cycle is strongly connected, and every strongly connected graph contains at least one cycle).

Kosaraju's algorithm, Tarjan's algorithm and Gabow's algorithm all efficiently compute the strongly connected components of a directed graph, but Tarjan's and Gabow's are favoured in practice since they require only one depth-first search rather than two.

Algorithms for finding strongly connected components may be used to solve 2-satisfiability problems (systems of Boolean variables with constraints on the values of pairs of variables): as Aspvall, Plass & Tarjan (1979) showed, a 2-satisfiability instance is unsatisfiable if and only if there is a variable v such that v and its complement are both contained in the same strongly connected component of the implication graph of the instance.

See also

• Connected component

References

• Aspvall, Bengt; Plass, Michael F.; Tarjan, Robert E. (1979), "A linear-time algorithm for testing the truth of certain quantified boolean formulas", Information Processing Letters 8 (3): 121–123, doi:10.1016/0020-0190(79)90002-4  .
• Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein. Introduction to Algorithms, Second Edition. MIT Press and McGraw-Hill, 2001. ISBN 0-262-03293-7. Section 22.5, pp.552–557.