Õptimal Fault-Tolerant Labeling for Reachability and Approximate Distances in Directed Planar Graphs

Abstract: We present a labeling scheme that assigns labels of size $\tilde O(1)$ to the vertices of a directed weighted planar graph $G$, such that for any fixed $\varepsilon>0$ from the labels of any three vertices $s$, $t$ and $f$ one can determine in $\tilde O(1)$ time a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation of the $s$-to-$t$ distance in the graph $G\setminus{f}$. For approximate distance queries, prior to our work, no efficient solution existed, not even in the centralized oracle setting. Even for the easier case of reachability, $\tilde O(1)$ queries were known only with a centralized oracle of size $\tilde O(n)$ [SODA 21].