Addressable heap

In computer science, an addressable heap is an abstract data type. Specifically, it is a mergeable heap supporting access to the elements of the heap via handles (also called references). It allows the key of the element referenced by a particular handle to be removed or decreased.

Definition

An addressable heap supports the following operations:^[1]

• Make-Heap(), creating an empty heap.
• Insert(H,x), inserting an element x into the heap H, and returning a handle to it.
• Min(H), returning a handle to the minimum element, or Nil if no such element exists.
• Extract-Min(H), extracting and returning a handle to the minimum element, or Nil if no such element exists.
• Remove(h), removing the element referenced by h (from its respective heap).
• Decrease-Key(h,k), decreasing the key of the element referenced by h to k; illegal if k is larger than the key referenced by h.
• Merge(H1,H2), combining the elements of H1 and H2.

Examples

Examples of addressable heaps include:

• Fibonacci heaps
• Binomial heaps

A more complete list with performance comparisons can be found here.

References

1. Mehlhorn, Kurt; Sanders, Peter (2008). Algorithms and Data Structures: The Basic Toolbox (PDF). Springer. ISBN 978-3-540-77977-3.