Efficient computation of bypass areas

Abstract

Route planning in road networks is a basic operation in the area of location-based services. Very often, the knowledge of the optimal route is not the only important information for a driver. Complex services could also present points of interest (e.g. hotels or gas stations) nearby the optimal route as stop-over. Here, ‘nearby’ means: the bypass route from a start to target that passes that point does not exceed certain costs. In this paper, we present an efficient approach to compute all bypasses that are within a given cost limit. We may additionally request only locally optimal bypasses, e.g., that reach an intermediate point without driving U-turns. The set of all bypasses called bypass area can be used for further queries, in e.g. geo databases to find nearby points of interest for a certain application or service. Our approach is fully implemented and evaluated and computes the respective bypass areas very runtime-efficient, whereas it re-uses similar structures as for optimal route planning.