3 \page quicktour Quick Tour to LEMON
5 Let us first answer the question <b>"What do I want to use LEMON for?"
7 LEMON is a C++ library, so you can use it if you want to write C++
8 programs. What kind of tasks does the library LEMON help to solve?
9 It helps to write programs that solve optimization problems that arise
10 frequently when <b>designing and testing certain networks</b>, for example
11 in telecommunication, computer networks, and other areas that I cannot
12 think of now. A very natural way of modelling these networks is by means
13 of a <b> graph</b> (we will always mean a directed graph by that).
14 So if you want to write a program that works with
15 graphs then you might find it useful to use our library LEMON.
19 Some examples are the following:
21 - First we give two examples that show how to instantiate a graph. The
22 first one shows the methods that add nodes and edges, but one will
23 usually use the second way which reads a graph from a stream (file).
26 -# The following code fragment shows how to fill a graph with data.
30 typedef ListGraph Graph;
31 typedef Graph::Edge Edge;
32 typedef Graph::InEdgeIt InEdgeIt;
33 typedef Graph::OutEdgeIt OutEdgeIt;
34 typedef Graph::EdgeIt EdgeIt;
35 typedef Graph::Node Node;
36 typedef Graph::NodeIt NodeIt;
40 for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++)
43 for (NodeIt i(g); i!=INVALID; ++i)
44 for (NodeIt j(g); j!=INVALID; ++j)
45 if (i != j) g.addEdge(i, j);
51 - If you want to solve some transportation problems in a network then
52 you will want to find shortest paths between nodes of a graph. This is
53 usually solved using Dijkstra's algorithm. A utility
54 that solves this is the \ref lemon::Dijkstra "LEMON Dijkstra class".
55 A simple program using the \ref lemon::Dijkstra "LEMON Dijkstra class" is
56 as follows (we assume that the graph is already given in the memory):
62 - If you want to design a network and want to minimize the total length
63 of wires then you might be looking for a <b>minimum spanning tree</b> in
64 an undirected graph. This can be found using the Kruskal algorithm: the
65 class \ref lemon::Kruskal "LEMON Kruskal class" does this job for you.
66 The following code fragment shows an example:
74 Some more detailed introduction can be obtained by following the links
77 \ref graphs "Graph structures"
78 play a central role in LEMON, so if you are new to the library,
79 you probably should start \ref graphs "here".
80 (You can also find that page along with others under
81 <a class="el" href="pages.html"> Related Pages </a>.)
84 interested in data structures and algorithms in more details, then
85 you should browse the reference manual part of the documentation.
86 Section <a class="el" href="modules.html"> Modules </a>
87 is a good starting point for this.