Efficient Fastest-Path Computations in Road Maps

In the age of real-time online traffic information and GPS-enabled devices, fastest-path computations between two points in a road network modeled as a directed graph, where each directed edge is weighted by a "travel time" value, are becoming a standard feature of many navigation-related applications. To support this, very efficient computation of these paths in very large road networks is critical. Fastest paths may be computed as minimal-cost paths in a weighted directed graph, but traditional minimal-cost path algorithms based on variants of the classic Dijkstra algorithm do not scale well, as in the worst case they may traverse the entire graph. A common improvement, which can dramatically reduce the number of traversed graph vertices, is the A* algorithm, which requires a good heuristic lower bound on the minimal cost. We introduce a simple, but very effective, heuristic function based on a small number of values assigned to each graph vertex. The values are based on graph separators and computed efficiently in a preprocessing stage. We present experimental results demonstrating that our heuristic provides estimates of the minimal cost which are superior to those of other heuristics. Our experiments show that when used in the A* algorithm, this heuristic can reduce the number of vertices traversed by an order of magnitude compared to other heuristics

Efficient motion planning for problems lacking optimal substructure

We consider the motion-planning problem of planning a collision-free path of a robot in the presence of risk zones. The robot is allowed to travel in these zones but is penalized in a super-linear fashion for consecutive accumulative time spent there. We suggest a natural cost function that balances path length and risk-exposure time. Specifically, we consider the discrete setting where we are given a graph, or a roadmap, and we wish to compute the minimal-cost path under this cost function. Interestingly, paths defined using our cost function do not have an optimal substructure. Namely, subpaths of an optimal path are not necessarily optimal. Thus, the Bellman condition is not satisfied and standard graph-search algorithms such as Dijkstra cannot be used. We present a path-finding algorithm, which can be seen as a natural generalization of Dijkstra's algorithm. Our algorithm runs in $O\left((n_B\cdot n) \log( n_B\cdot n) + n_B\cdot m\right)$ time, where~$n$ and $m$ are the number of vertices and edges of the graph, respectively, and $n_B$ is the number of intersections between edges and the boundary of the risk zone. We present simulations on robotic platforms demonstrating both the natural paths produced by our cost function and the computational efficiency of our algorithm

Intriguingly Simple and Efficient Time-Dependent Routing in Road Networks

We study the earliest arrival problem in road networks with static time-dependent functions as arc weights. We propose and evaluate the following simple algorithm: (1) average the travel time in k time windows, (2) compute a shortest time-independent path within each window and mark the edges in these paths, and (3) compute a shortest time-dependent path in the original graph restricted to the marked edges. Our experimental evaluation shows that this simple algorithm yields near optimal results on well-established benchmark instances. We additionally demonstrate that the error can be further reduced by additionally considering alternative routes at the expense of more marked edges. Finally, we show that the achieved subgraphs are small enough to be able to efficiently implement profile queries using a simple sampling-based approach. A highlight of our introduced algorithms is that they do not rely on linking and merging profile functions

Fast Shortest Path Distance Estimation in Large Networks

We study the problem of preprocessing a large graph so that point-to-point shortest-path queries can be answered very fast. Computing shortest paths is a well studied problem, but exact algorithms do not scale to huge graphs encountered on the web, social networks, and other applications. In this paper we focus on approximate methods for distance estimation, in particular using landmark-based distance indexing. This approach involves selecting a subset of nodes as landmarks and computing (offline) the distances from each node in the graph to those landmarks. At runtime, when the distance between a pair of nodes is needed, we can estimate it quickly by combining the precomputed distances of the two nodes to the landmarks. We prove that selecting the optimal set of landmarks is an NP-hard problem, and thus heuristic solutions need to be employed. Given a budget of memory for the index, which translates directly into a budget of landmarks, different landmark selection strategies can yield dramatically different results in terms of accuracy. A number of simple methods that scale well to large graphs are therefore developed and experimentally compared. The simplest methods choose central nodes of the graph, while the more elaborate ones select central nodes that are also far away from one another. The efficiency of the suggested techniques is tested experimentally using five different real world graphs with millions of edges; for a given accuracy, they require as much as 250 times less space than the current approach in the literature which considers selecting landmarks at random. Finally, we study applications of our method in two problems arising naturally in large-scale networks, namely, social search and community detection.Yahoo! Research (internship

Shortest Paths and Distances with Differential Privacy

We introduce a model for differentially private analysis of weighted graphs in which the graph topology $(V,E)$ is assumed to be public and the private information consists only of the edge weights $w:E\to\mathbb{R}^+$. This can express hiding congestion patterns in a known system of roads. Differential privacy requires that the output of an algorithm provides little advantage, measured by privacy parameters $\epsilon$ and $\delta$, for distinguishing between neighboring inputs, which are thought of as inputs that differ on the contribution of one individual. In our model, two weight functions $w,w'$ are considered to be neighboring if they have $\ell_1$ distance at most one. We study the problems of privately releasing a short path between a pair of vertices and of privately releasing approximate distances between all pairs of vertices. We are concerned with the approximation error, the difference between the length of the released path or released distance and the length of the shortest path or actual distance. For privately releasing a short path between a pair of vertices, we prove a lower bound of $\Omega(|V|)$ on the additive approximation error for fixed $\epsilon,\delta$. We provide a differentially private algorithm that matches this error bound up to a logarithmic factor and releases paths between all pairs of vertices. The approximation error of our algorithm can be bounded by the number of edges on the shortest path, so we achieve better accuracy than the worst-case bound for vertex pairs that are connected by a low-weight path with $o(|V|)$ vertices. For privately releasing all-pairs distances, we show that for trees we can release all distances with approximation error $O(\log^{2.5}|V|)$ for fixed privacy parameters. For arbitrary bounded-weight graphs with edge weights in $[0,M]$ we can release all distances with approximation error $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{|V|M})$

A comprehensive theory of cascading via-paths and the reciprocal pointer chain method

In this paper, we consolidate and expand upon the current theory and potential applications of the set of $k$ best \emph{cascading via-paths} (CVPs) and the \emph{reciprocal pointer chain} (RPC) method for identifying them. CVPs are a collection of up to $|V|$ paths between a source and a target node in a graph $G = (V,E)$, computed using two shortest path trees, that have distinctive properties relative to other path sets. They have been shown to be particularly useful in geospatial applications, where they are an intuitive and efficient means for identifying a set of spatially diverse alternatives to the single shortest path between the source and target. However, spatial diversity is not intrinsic to paths in a graph, and little theory has been developed outside of application to describe the nature of these paths and the RPC method in general. Here we divorce the RPC method from its typical geospatial applications and develop a comprehensive theory of CVPs from an abstract graph-theoretic perspective. Restricting ourselves to properties of the CVPs and of the entire set of $k$-best CVPs that can be computed in $O(|E| + |V| \log |V|)$, we are able to then propose, among other things, new and efficient approaches to problems such as generating a diverse set of paths and to computing the $k$ shortest loopless paths between two nodes in a graph. We conclude by demonstrating the new theory in practice, first for a typical application of finding alternative routes in road networks and then for a novel application of identifying layer-boundaries in ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data. It is our hope that by generalizing the RPC method, providing a sound theoretical foundation, and demonstrating novel uses, we are able to broaden its perceived applicability and stimulate new research in this area, both applied and theoretical

On the Complexity of Hub Labeling

Hub Labeling (HL) is a data structure for distance oracles. Hierarchical HL (HHL) is a special type of HL, that received a lot of attention from a practical point of view. However, theoretical questions such as NP-hardness and approximation guarantee for HHL algorithms have been left aside. In this paper we study HL and HHL from the complexity theory point of view. We prove that both HL and HHL are NP-hard, and present upper and lower bounds for the approximation ratios of greedy HHL algorithms used in practice. We also introduce a new variant of the greedy HHL algorithm and a proof that it produces small labels for graphs with small highway dimension

Customizable Contraction Hierarchies

We consider the problem of quickly computing shortest paths in weighted graphs given auxiliary data derived in an expensive preprocessing phase. By adding a fast weight-customization phase, we extend Contraction Hierarchies by Geisberger et al to support the three-phase workflow introduced by Delling et al. Our Customizable Contraction Hierarchies use nested dissection orders as suggested by Bauer et al. We provide an in-depth experimental analysis on large road and game maps that clearly shows that Customizable Contraction Hierarchies are a very practicable solution in scenarios where edge weights often change

Towards Knowledge-Enriched Path Computation

Directions and paths, as commonly provided by navigation systems, are usually derived considering absolute metrics, e.g., finding the shortest path within an underlying road network. With the aid of crowdsourced geospatial data we aim at obtaining paths that do not only minimize distance but also lead through more popular areas using knowledge generated by users. We extract spatial relations such as "nearby" or "next to" from travel blogs, that define closeness between pairs of points of interest (PoIs) and quantify each of these relations using a probabilistic model. Subsequently, we create a relationship graph where each node corresponds to a PoI and each edge describes the spatial connection between the respective PoIs. Using Bayesian inference we obtain a probabilistic measure of spatial closeness according to the crowd. Applying this measure to the corresponding road network, we obtain an altered cost function which does not exclusively rely on distance, and enriches an actual road networks taking crowdsourced spatial relations into account. Finally, we propose two routing algorithms on the enriched road networks. To evaluate our approach, we use Flickr photo data as a ground truth for popularity. Our experimental results -- based on real world datasets -- show that the paths computed w.r.t.\ our alternative cost function yield competitive solutions in terms of path length while also providing more "popular" paths, making routing easier and more informative for the user.Comment: Accepted as a short paper at ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 201

Path-Fault-Tolerant Approximate Shortest-Path Trees

Let $G=(V,E)$ be an $n$-nodes non-negatively real-weighted undirected graph. In this paper we show how to enrich a {\em single-source shortest-path tree} (SPT) of $G$ with a \emph{sparse} set of \emph{auxiliary} edges selected from $E$, in order to create a structure which tolerates effectively a \emph{path failure} in the SPT. This consists of a simultaneous fault of a set $F$ of at most $f$ adjacent edges along a shortest path emanating from the source, and it is recognized as one of the most frequent disruption in an SPT. We show that, for any integer parameter $k \geq 1$, it is possible to provide a very sparse (i.e., of size $O(kn\cdot f^{1+1/k})$) auxiliary structure that carefully approximates (i.e., within a stretch factor of $(2k-1)(2|F|+1)$) the true shortest paths from the source during the lifetime of the failure. Moreover, we show that our construction can be further refined to get a stretch factor of $3$ and a size of $O(n \log n)$ for the special case $f=2$, and that it can be converted into a very efficient \emph{approximate-distance sensitivity oracle}, that allows to quickly (even in optimal time, if $k=1$) reconstruct the shortest paths (w.r.t. our structure) from the source after a path failure, thus permitting to perform promptly the needed rerouting operations. Our structure compares favorably with previous known solutions, as we discuss in the paper, and moreover it is also very effective in practice, as we assess through a large set of experiments.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figures, SIROCCO 201