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Contraction Hierarchies: Faster and Simpler Hierarchical Routing in Road Networks

  • Robert Geisberger
  • Peter Sanders
  • Dominik Schultes
  • Daniel Delling
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 5038)

Abstract

We present a route planning technique solely based on the concept of node contraction. The nodes are first ordered by ‘importance’. A hierarchy is then generated by iteratively contracting the least important node. Contracting a node v means replacing shortest paths going through v by shortcuts. We obtain a hierarchical query algorithm using bidirectional shortest-path search. The forward search uses only edges leading to more important nodes and the backward search uses only edges coming from more important nodes. For fastest routes in road networks, the graph remains very sparse throughout the contraction process using rather simple heuristics for ordering the nodes. We have five times lower query times than the best previous hierarchical Dijkstra-based speedup techniques and a negative space overhead, i.e., the data structure for distance computation needs less space than the input graph. CHs can be combined with many other route planning techniques, leading to improved performance for many-to-many routing, transit-node routing, goal-directed routing or mobile and dynamic scenarios.

Keywords

Short Path Road Network Priority Queue Query Time Input Graph 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008

Authors and Affiliations

  • Robert Geisberger
    • 1
  • Peter Sanders
    • 1
  • Dominik Schultes
    • 1
  • Daniel Delling
    • 1
  1. 1.Universität Karlsruhe (TH)KarlsruheGermany

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