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Discovering historic traffic-tolerant paths in road networks

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Abstract

Historic traffic information is valuable in transportation analysis and planning, e.g., evaluating the reliability of routes for representative source-destination pairs. Also, it can be utilized to provide efficient and effective route-search services. In view of these applications, we propose the k traffic-tolerant paths (TTP) problem on road networks, which takes a source-destination pair and historic traffic information as input, and returns k paths that minimize the aggregate (historic) travel time. Unlike the shortest path problem, the TTP problem has a combinatorial search space that renders the optimal solution expensive to find. First, we propose an exact algorithm with effective pruning rules to reduce the search time. Second, we develop an anytime heuristic algorithm that makes ‘best-effort’ to find a low-cost solution within a given time limit. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic traffic data demonstrate the effectiveness of TTP and the efficiency of our proposed algorithms.

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Notes

  1. Collected from roadside sensors [2], crowdsourcing [4], or traffic information providers [6].

  2. The state-of-the-art shortest path index, AH [27], takes hundreds of seconds for index pre-computation on a road network with a million nodes.

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Acknowledgments

Man Lung Yiu was supported by ICRG grant G-YN38 from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Kyriakos Mouratidis was supported by research grant 14-C220-SMU-004 from the Singapore Management University Office of Research under the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Funding Tier 1 Grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Pui Hang Li & Man Lung Yiu

  2. School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Singapore, Singapore

    Kyriakos Mouratidis

Authors
  1. Pui Hang Li
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  2. Man Lung Yiu
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  3. Kyriakos Mouratidis
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Correspondence to Pui Hang Li.

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Li, P.H., Yiu, M.L. & Mouratidis, K. Discovering historic traffic-tolerant paths in road networks. Geoinformatica 21, 1–32 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-016-0265-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-016-0265-y

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