Hey there,
I'm currently writing an optimization algorithm in MATLAB, at which I completely suck, therefore I could really use your help. I'm really struggling to find a good way of representing a graph (or well more like a tree with several roots) which would look more or less like this:
Basically 11/12/13 are our roots (stage 0), 2x is stage1, 3x stage2 and 4x stage3. As you can see nodes from stageX are only connected to several nodes from stage(X+1) (so they don't have to be connected to all of them).
Important: each node has to hold several values (at least 3-4), one will be it's number and at least two other variables (which will be used to optimize the decisions).
I do have a simple representation using matrices but it's really hard to maintain, so I was wondering is there a good way to do it?
Second question: when I'm done with that representation I need to calculate how good each route (from roots to the end) is (like let's say I need to compare is 11-21-31-41 the best or is 11-21-31-42 better) to do that I will be using the variables that each node holds. But the values will have to be calculated recursively, let's say we start at 11 but to calcultate how good 11-21-31-41 is we first need to go to 41, do some calculations, go to 31, do some calculations, go to 21 do some calculations and then we can calculate 11 using all the previous calculations. Same with 11-21-31-42 (we start with 42 then 31->21->11). I need to check all the possible routes that way. And here's the question, how to do it? Maybe a BFS/DFS? But I'm not quite sure how to store all the results.
Those are some lengthy questions, but I hope I'm not asking you for doing my homework (as I got all the algorithms, it's just that I'm not really good at matlab and my teacher wouldn't let me to do it in java).