It appears that dijkstra_shortest_paths assumes that it will create the color map, rather than you creating it.
That's what it looks like, but is not what I'd expect from the documentation. Also it means that the named parameters variant behaves differently from the plain variant.
Is there a reason you need your own?
Yes, what I really want is to interupt the algorithm once a criterion is met. For instance all vertices within a given distance are found, or all vertices from a list of targets are found. Then, I want to do further computations (traffic modelling) on the black vertices only. Finally, I would like to be able to resume the interupted algorithm, but that is a spearate matter (and I am starting to think that to solve that neatly, I will need to use breath_first_search() directly, because that allows specifying the priority queue as well).
If you want to know whether vertices have been visited, check their distances against the infinity value that you passed in to the algorithm.
Thanks, it's a good tip, but not exactly what I need. It would tell me which veritces have been visited, but not whether their distance value is tentative (gray vertices) or final (black vertices). My workaround is to not use named parameters. It makes the code less concise, but the results are correct. I replaced the following: boost::dijkstra_shortest_paths<TSubGraph, TVisitor >( graph, source, boost::predecessor_map( &predecessors[0] ) .distance_map( &distances[0] ) .visitor( visitor ) .color_map( &colors[0]) ); With this: boost::dijkstra_shortest_paths<TSubGraph, TVisitor >( graph, // Graph& source // vertex_descriptor s, &predecessors[0], // PredecessorMap &distances[0], // DistanceMap, boost::get(boost::edge_weight, graph), // WeightMap boost::get(boost::vertex_index, graph), // VertexIndexMap std::less<double>(), // CompareFunction boost::closed_plus<double>(), // CombineFunction std::numeric_limits<double>::max(), // DistInf (double) 0.0, // DistZero visitor, // DijkstraVisitor &colors[0] // ColorMap ); -- Alex Hagen-Zanker