Generating a random DAG

Question

I am solving a problem on directed acyclic graph.

But I am having trouble testing my code on some directed acyclic graphs. The test graphs should be large, and (obviously) acyclic.

I tried a lot to write code for generating acyclic directed graphs. But I failed every time.

Is there some existing method to generate acyclic directed graphs I could use?

Answer 1

I cooked up a C program that does this. The key is to 'rank' the nodes, and only draw edges from lower ranked nodes to higher ranked ones.

The program I wrote prints in the DOT language.

Here is the code itself, with comments explaining what it means:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <time.h>

#define MIN_PER_RANK 1 /* Nodes/Rank: How 'fat' the DAG should be.  */
#define MAX_PER_RANK 5
#define MIN_RANKS 3    /* Ranks: How 'tall' the DAG should be.  */
#define MAX_RANKS 5
#define PERCENT 30     /* Chance of having an Edge.  */

int main (void)
{
  int i, j, k,nodes = 0;
  srand (time (NULL));

  int ranks = MIN_RANKS
              + (rand () % (MAX_RANKS - MIN_RANKS + 1));

  printf ("digraph {\n");
  for (i = 0; i < ranks; i++)
    {
      /* New nodes of 'higher' rank than all nodes generated till now.  */
      int new_nodes = MIN_PER_RANK
                      + (rand () % (MAX_PER_RANK - MIN_PER_RANK + 1));

      /* Edges from old nodes ('nodes') to new ones ('new_nodes').  */
      for (j = 0; j < nodes; j++)
        for (k = 0; k < new_nodes; k++)
          if ( (rand () % 100) < PERCENT)
            printf ("  %d -> %d;\n", j, k + nodes); /* An Edge.  */

      nodes += new_nodes; /* Accumulate into old node set.  */
    }
  printf ("}\n");
  return 0;
}

And here is the graph generated from a test run: