Practical evaluation of kinetic data structures

Abstract

The implementation of and experimentation with several data structures for maintaining the convex hull of points continuously moving in a plane are presented. The evaluation of kinetic data structures do not pose major implementation problems and perform well on several natural distributions, while some alternative data structures suffer from non-locality or the expensive root-finding operation they perform. All methods that operate on these data structures stand to gain from the implementation and particular advantaged can be gained by using simpler data structures when the number of points is small. Kinetic data structures can be used to maintain the convex hull and any triangulation.