A _temporal graph_ is, informally speaking, a graph that changes with time. When time is discrete and only the relationships between the participating entities may change and not the entities themselves, a temporal graph may be viewed as a sequence _G_₁, _G_₂…, _G__l of static graphs over the same (static) set of nodes _V_. Though static graphs have been extensively studied, for their temporal generalization we are still far from having a concrete set of structural and algorithmic principles. Recent research shows that many graph properties and problems become radically different and usually substantially more difficult when an extra time dimension is added to them. Moreover, there is already a rich and rapidly growing set of modern systems and applications that can be naturally modeled and studied via temporal graphs. This, further motivates the need for the development of a temporal extension of graph theory. We survey here recent results on temporal graphs and temporal graph problems that have appeared in the Computer Science community.

In this work we consider temporal networks, i.e. networks defined by a labeling \(\lambda \) assigning to each edge of an underlying graph G a set of discrete time-labels. The labels of an edge, which are natural numbers, indicate the discrete time moments at which the edge is available. We focus on path problems of temporal networks. In particular, we consider time-respecting paths, i.e. paths whose edges are assigned by \(\lambda \) a strictly increasing sequence of labels. We begin by giving two efficient algorithms for computing shortest time-respecting paths on a temporal network. We then prove that there is a natural analogue of Menger’s theorem holding for arbitrary temporal networks. Finally, we propose two cost minimization parameters for temporal network design. One is the temporality of G, in which the goal is to minimize the maximum number of labels of an edge, and the other is the temporal cost of G, in which the goal is to minimize the total number of labels used. Optimization of these parameters is performed subject to some connectivity constraint. We prove several lower and upper bounds for the temporality and the temporal cost of some very basic graph families such as rings, directed acyclic graphs, and trees.