Online computation of fastest path in time-dependent spatial networks

Abstract

The problem of point-to-point fastest path computation in static spatial networks is extensively studied with many precomputation techniques proposed to speed-up the computation. Most of the existing approaches make the simplifying assumption that travel-times of the network edges are constant. However, with real-world spatial networks the edge travel-times are time-dependent, where the arrival-time to an edge determines the actual travel-time on the edge. In this paper, we study the online computation of fastest path in time-dependent spatial networks and present a technique which speeds-up the path computation. We show that our fastest path computation based on a bidirectional time-dependent A*search significantly improves the computation time and storage complexity. With extensive experiments using real data-sets (including a variety of large spatial networks with real traffic data) we demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed techniques for online fastest path computation. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.