Route Planning in Transportation Networks

We survey recent advances in algorithms for route planning in transportation networks. For road networks, we show that one can compute driving directions in milliseconds or less even at continental scale. A variety of techniques provide different trade-offs between preprocessing effort, space requirements, and query time. Some algorithms can answer queries in a fraction of a microsecond, while others can deal efficiently with real-time traffic. Journey planning on public transportation systems, although conceptually similar, is a significantly harder problem due to its inherent time-dependent and multicriteria nature. Although exact algorithms are fast enough for interactive queries on metropolitan transit systems, dealing with continent-sized instances requires simplifications or heavy preprocessing. The multimodal route planning problem, which seeks journeys combining schedule-based transportation (buses, trains) with unrestricted modes (walking, driving), is even harder, relying on approximate solutions even for metropolitan inputs.Comment: This is an updated version of the technical report MSR-TR-2014-4, previously published by Microsoft Research. This work was mostly done while the authors Daniel Delling, Andrew Goldberg, and Renato F. Werneck were at Microsoft Research Silicon Valle

Customizable Contraction Hierarchies with Turn Costs

We incorporate turn restrictions and turn costs into the route planning algorithm customizable contraction hierarchies (CCH). There are two common ways to represent turn costs and restrictions. The edge-based model expands the network so that road segments become vertices and allowed turns become edges. The compact model keeps intersections as vertices, but associates a turn table with each vertex. Although CCH can be used as is on the edge-based model, the performance of preprocessing and customization is severely affected. While the expanded network is only three times larger, both preprocessing and customization time increase by up to an order of magnitude. In this work, we carefully engineer CCH to exploit different properties of the expanded graph. We reduce the increase in customization time from up to an order of magnitude to a factor of about 3. The increase in preprocessing time is reduced even further. Moreover, we present a CCH variant that works on the compact model, and show that it performs worse than the variant on the edge-based model. Surprisingly, the variant on the edge-based model even uses less space than the one on the compact model, although the compact model was developed to keep the space requirement low

Fast and Stable Repartitioning of Road Networks

We study the problem of graph partitioning for evolving road networks. While the road network of the world is mostly stable, small updates happen on a relatively frequent basis, as can been observed with the OpenStreetMap project (http://www.openstreetmap.org). For various reasons, professional applications demand the graph partition to stay roughly the same over time, and that changes are limited to areas where graph updates occur. In this work, we define the problem, present algorithms to satisfy the stability needs, and evaluate our techniques on continental-sized road networks. Besides the stability gains, we show that, when the changes are low and local, running our novel techniques is an order of magnitude faster than running graph partitioning from scratch

An Analysis of Some Algorithms and Heuristics for Multiobjective Graph Search

Muchos problemas reales requieren examinar un número exponencial de alternativas para encontrar la elección óptima. A este tipo de problemas se les llama de optimización combinatoria. Además, en problemas reales normalmente se evalúan múltiples magnitudes que presentan conflicto entre ellas. Cuando se optimizan múltiples obje-tivos simultáneamente, generalmente no existe un valor óptimo que satisfaga al mismo tiempo los requisitos para todos los criterios. Solucionar estos problemas combinatorios multiobjetivo deriva comúnmente en un gran conjunto de soluciones Pareto-óptimas, que definen los balances óptimos entre los objetivos considerados. En esta tesis se considera uno de los problemas multiobjetivo más recurrentes: la búsqueda de caminos más cortos en un grafo, teniendo en cuenta múltiples objetivos al mismo tiempo. Se pueden señalar muchas aplicaciones prácticas de la búsqueda multiobjetivo en diferentes dominios: enrutamiento en redes multimedia (Clímaco et al., 2003), programación de satélites (Gabrel & Vanderpooten, 2002), problemas de transporte (Pallottino & Scutellà, 1998), enrutamiento en redes de ferrocarril (Müller-Hannemann & Weihe, 2006), planificación de rutas en redes de carreteras (Jozefowiez et al., 2008), vigilancia con robots (delle Fave et al., 2009) o planificación independiente del dominio (Refanidis & Vlahavas, 2003). La planificación de rutas multiobjetivo sobre mapas de carretera realistas ha sido considerada como un escenario de aplicación potencial para los algoritmos y heurísticos multiobjetivo considerados en esta tesis. El transporte de materias peligrosas (Erkut et al., 2007), otro problema de enrutamiento multiobjetivo relacionado, ha sido también considerado como un escenario de aplicación potencial interesante. Los métodos de optimización de un solo criterio son bien conocidos y han sido ampliamente estudiados. La Búsqueda Heurística permite la reducción de los requisitos de espacio y tiempo de estos métodos, explotando el uso de estimaciones de la distancia real al objetivo. Los problemas multiobjetivo son bastante más complejos que sus equivalentes de un solo objetivo y requieren métodos específicos. Éstos, van desde técnicas de solución exactas a otras aproximadas, que incluyen los métodos metaheurísticos aproximados comúnmente encontrados en la literatura. Esta tesis se ocupa de algoritmos exactos primero-el-mejor y, en particular, del uso de información heurística para mejorar su rendimiento. Esta tesis contribuye análisis tanto formales como empíricos de algoritmos y heurísticos para búsqueda multiobjetivo. La caracterización formal de estos algoritmos es importante para el campo. Sin embargo, la evaluación empírica es también de gran importancia para la aplicación real de estos métodos. Se han utilizado diversas clases de problemas bien conocidos para probar su rendimiento, incluyendo escenarios realistas como los descritos más arriba. Los resultados de esta tesis proporcionan una mejor comprensión de qué métodos de los disponibles sonmejores en situaciones prácticas. Se presentan explicaciones formales y empíricas acerca de su comportamiento. Se muestra que la búsqueda heurística reduce considerablemente los requisitos de espacio y tiempo en la mayoría de las ocasiones. En particular, se presentan los primeros resultados sistemáticos mostrando las ventajas de la aplicación de heurísticos multiobjetivo precalculados. Esta tesis también aporta un método mejorado para el precálculo de los heurísticos, y explora la conveniencia de heurísticos precalculados más informados.Many real problems require the examination of an exponential number of alternatives in order to find the best choice. They are the so-called combinatorial optimization problems. Besides, real problems usually involve the consideration of several conflicting magnitudes. When multiple objectives must be simultaneously optimized, there is generally not an optimal value satisfying the requirements for all the criteria at the same time. Solving these multiobjective combinatorial problems commonly results in a large set of Pareto-optimal solutions, which define the optimal tradeoffs between the objectives under consideration. One of most recurrent multiobjective problems is considered in this thesis: the search for shortest paths in a graph, taking into account several objectives at the same time. Many practical applications of multiobjective search in different domains can be pointed out: routing in multimedia networks (Clímaco et al., 2003), satellite scheduling (Gabrel & Vanderpooten, 2002), transportation problems (Pallottino & Scutellà, 1998), routing in railway networks (Müller-Hannemann & Weihe, 2006), route planning in road maps (Jozefowiez et al., 2008), robot surveillance (delle Fave et al., 2009) or domain independent planning (Refanidis & Vlahavas, 2003). Multiobjective route planning over realistic road maps has been considered as a potential application scenario for the multiobjective algorithms and heuristics considered in this thesis. Hazardous material transportation (Erkut et al., 2007), another related multiobjective routing problem, has also been considered as an interesting potential application scenario. Single criterion shortest path methods are well known and have been widely studied. Heuristic Search allows the reduction of the space and time requirements of these methods, exploiting estimates of the actual distance to the goal. Multiobjective problems are much more complex than their single-objective counterparts, and require specific methods. These range from exact solution techniques to approximate ones, including the metaheuristic approximate methods usually found in the literature. This thesis is concerned with exact best-first algorithms, and particularly, with the use of heuristic information to improve their performance. This thesis contributes both formal and empirical analysis of algorithms and heuristics for multiobjective search. The formal characterization of algorithms is important for the field. However, empirical evaluation is also of great importance for the real application of these methods. Several well known classes of problems have been used to test their performance, including some realistic scenarios as described above. The results of this thesis provide a better understanding of which of the available methods are better in practical situations. Formal and empirical explanations of their behaviour are presented. Heuristic search is shown to reduce considerably space and time requirements in most situations. In particular, the first systematic results showing the advantages of the application of precalculated multiobjective heuristics are presented. The thesis also contributes an improved method for heuristic precalculation, and explores the convenience of more informed precalculated heuristics.This work is partially funded by / Este trabajo está financiado por: Consejería de Economía, Innovación, Ciencia y Empresa. Junta de Andalucía (España) Referencia: P07-TIC-0301

LightPIR: Privacy-Preserving Route Discovery for Payment Channel Networks

Payment channel networks are a promising approach to improve the scalability of cryptocurrencies: they allow to perform transactions in a peer-to-peer fashion, along multi-hop routes in the network, without requiring consensus on the blockchain. However, during the discovery of cost-efficient routes for the transaction, critical information may be revealed about the transacting entities. This paper initiates the study of privacy-preserving route discovery mechanisms for payment channel networks. In particular, we present LightPIR, an approach which allows a source to efficiently discover a shortest path to its destination without revealing any information about the endpoints of the transaction. The two main observations which allow for an efficient solution in LightPIR are that: (1) surprisingly, hub labelling algorithms - which were developed to preprocess "street network like" graphs so one can later efficiently compute shortest paths - also work well for the graphs underlying payment channel networks, and that (2) hub labelling algorithms can be directly combined with private information retrieval. LightPIR relies on a simple hub labeling heuristic on top of existing hub labeling algorithms which leverages the specific topological features of cryptocurrency networks to further minimize storage and bandwidth overheads. In a case study considering the Lightning network, we show that our approach is an order of magnitude more efficient compared to a privacy-preserving baseline based on using private information retrieval on a database that stores all pairs shortest paths

Time dependent sharc routing

During the last years, many speed-up techniques for Dijkstra 's algorithm have been developed. As a result, computing a shortest path in a staticroad network is a matter of microseconds. However, only few of those techniques work in time-dependentnetworks. Unfortunately, such networks appear frequentely in reality: Roads are predictably congestured by traffic jams, and efficient timetable information systems rely on time-dependent networks. Hence, a fast technique for routing in such networks is needed. In this work, we present an exacttime-dependent speed-up technique based on our recent SHARC-algorithm. As a result, we are able to efficiently compute shortest paths in time-dependent continental-sized transportation networks, both of roads and of railways. Document type: Part of book or chapter of boo

Distances and shortest paths on graphs of bounded highway dimension: simple, fast, dynamic

Dijkstra's algorithm is the standard method for computing shortest paths on arbitrary graphs. However, it is slow for large graphs, taking at least linear time. It has been long known that for real world road networks, creating a hierarchy of well-chosen shortcuts allows fast distance and path computation, with exact distance queries seemingly being answered in logarithmic time. However, these methods were but heuristics until the work of Abraham et al.~[JACM 2016], where they defined a graph parameter called highway dimension which is constant for real-world road networks, and showed that in graphs of constant highway dimension, a shortcut hierarchy exists that guarantees shortest distance computation takes $O(\log (U+V))$ time and $O(V \log (U+V))$ space, where $U$ is the ratio of the smallest to largest edge, and $V$ is the number of vertices. The problem is that they were unable to efficiently compute the hierarchy of shortcuts. Here we present a simple and efficient algorithm to compute the needed hierarchy of shortcuts in time and space $O(V \log (U+V))$, as well as supporting updates in time $O( \log (U+V))$

Route Planning in Road Networks

We present various speedup techniques for route planning in road networks. After performing some preprocessing steps, we can compute accurate quickest-path lengths in a few microseconds on a 2.0 GHz machine, using real-world road networks with several million nodes. In addition to dealing with the static point-to-point problem, we also handle dynamic scenarios (like traffic jams) and many-to-many instances

Algorithm Engineering for Realistic Journey Planning in Transportation Networks

Diese Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit der Routenplanung in Transportnetzen. Es werden neue, effiziente algorithmische Ansätze zur Berechnung optimaler Verbindungen in öffentlichen Verkehrsnetzen, Straßennetzen und multimodalen Netzen, die verschiedene Transportmodi miteinander verknüpfen, eingeführt. Im Fokus der Arbeit steht dabei die Praktikabilität der Ansätze, was durch eine ausführliche experimentelle Evaluation belegt wird