Finding common communicators

The Graph Browser can detect paths that minimize the distance between three or more input nodes at the same time. The resulting generated paths tend to reach toward a common subset of nodes that act as intermediaries between the input nodes.

To detect these nodes, select the input nodes and right-click to select Common Communicators from the context menu.

The input parameters are equivalent to those that are already specified for the Shortest Path script and all performance-related notes for the Shortest Path apply here, too.

The number of selected input nodes is an important factor that affects the speed and required memory usage of the Common Communicators script. Selecting many input nodes would be very slow and could potentially saturate the available Federate Root Allocator memory pool. It would also make it harder to find paths since the algorithm must generate a path connecting all of the input nodes. Consequently, Investigate only allows 3 or 4 selected input nodes for the Common Communicators script.

Both the shortest path and the common communicators scripts are available in new Graph Browser visualizations when you select Add all available lenses and contextual scripts in the Script auto configuration section.

To add these functions to the context menu of an existing Graph Browser, follow the instructions in Contextual Functions.