Figure 5.

The concept of a synthetic cycle. (a) Five path constraints b₁, b₂, ..., b₅ link five connected components A, B, C, D, and E to form a synthetic cycle in a constraint graph. (b) The conceptual view of the synthetic cycle of (a) in a pedigree graph. The synthetic cycle is actually a round trip through the tree edges and the non-tree edge e. The trip is composed of 10 different but connected paths in the pedigree graph. In this example, e would be visited five times during the trip.