Alternative route graphs in road networks

Abstract

Every human likes choices. But today's fast route planning algorithms usually compute just a single route between source and target. There are beginnings to compute alternative routes, but there is a gap between the intuition of humans what makes a good alternative and mathematical definitions needed for grasping these concepts algorithmically. In this paper we make several steps towards closing this gap: Based on the concept of an alternative graph that can compactly encode many alternatives, we define and motivate several attributes quantifying the quality of the alternative graph. We show that it is already NP-hard to optimize a simple objective function combining two of these attributes and therefore turn to heuristics. The combination of the refined penalty based iterative shortest path routine and the previously proposed Plateau heuristics yields best results. A user study confirms these results. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.