Many networked systems involve multiple modes of transport. Such systems are
called multimodal, and examples include logistic networks, biomedical
phenomena, manufacturing process and telecommunication networks. Existing
techniques for determining optimal paths in multimodal networks have either
required heuristics or else application-specific constraints to obtain
tractable problems, removing the multimodal traits of the network during
analysis.
A weighted coloured-edge graph is a graph for which each edge is assigned
both a positive weight and a discrete colour, and can be used to model
transportation and computer networks in which there are multiple transportation
modes. In such a graph paths are compared by their total weight in each colour,
resulting in a Pareto set of minimal paths from one vertex to another. This
paper will give a tight upper bound on the cardinality of a minimal set of
paths for any weighted coloured-edge graph.