  Given a directed graph and a source vertex, the fully dynamic single-source
reachability problem is to maintain the set of vertices that are reachable from
the given vertex, subject to edge deletions and insertions. It is one of the
most fundamental problems on graphs and appears directly or indirectly in many
and varied applications. While there has been theoretical work on this problem,
showing both linear conditional lower bounds for the fully dynamic problem and
insertions-only and deletions-only upper bounds beating these conditional lower
bounds, there has been no experimental study that compares the performance of
fully dynamic reachability algorithms in practice. Previous experimental
studies in this area concentrated only on the more general all-pairs
reachability or transitive closure problem and did not use real-world dynamic
graphs.
  In this paper, we bridge this gap by empirically studying an extensive set of
algorithms for the single-source reachability problem in the fully dynamic
setting. In particular, we design several fully dynamic variants of well-known
approaches to obtain and maintain reachability information with respect to a
distinguished source. Moreover, we extend the existing insertions-only or
deletions-only upper bounds into fully dynamic algorithms. Even though the
worst-case time per operation of all the fully dynamic algorithms we evaluate
is at least linear in the number of edges in the graph (as is to be expected
given the conditional lower bounds) we show in our extensive experimental
evaluation that their performance differs greatly, both on generated as well as
on real-world instances.
