Fast exact computation of isochrones in road networks

Abstract

We study the problem of computing isochrones in static and dynamic road networks, where the objective is to identify the boundary of the region in range from a given source within a certain amount of time. While there is a wide range of practical applications for this problem (e. g., urban planning, geomarketing, visualizing the cruising range of a vehicle), there has been little research on fast algorithms for large, realistic inputs, and existing approaches tend to compute more information than necessary. Our contribution is twofold: (1) We propose a more compact but sufficient definition of isochrones, based on which, (2) we provide several easy-to-parallelize, scalable algorithmic approaches for faster computation. By extensive experimental analysis, we demonstrate that our techniques enable fast isochrone computation within milliseconds even on continental networks, significantly faster than the state-of-the-art.