Parallel methods for visibility and shortest-path problems in simple polygons (Q1201749)

Visibility problems for simple polygons are intensively studied in computational geometry, usually by means of visibility graphs and shortest-paths trees. The authors introduce a new data structure called stratified decomposition tree which allows to answer effectively shortes path queries in a simple polygon. This is a main tool for deriving a number of parallel algorithms, all running in \(O(\log n)\) time on CREW PRAM. This is an improvement over \(O(\log^ 2n)\) existing algorithms.