Explaining the Performance of Bidirectional Dijkstra and A* on Road Networks

The heuristic search community traditionally uses A* as the baseline algorithm for their research methods. Research papers in the road networks community, however, often build upon Dijkstra\u27s algorithm and use Bidirectional Dijkstra\u27s algorithm as their baseline. This thesis investigates the performance of A* and Bidirectional Dijkstra in road networks to see how they compare and to see if there is a principled explanation for the different approaches. Our analysis reveals why Bidirectional Dijkstra can perform well in this domain, but also shows a simple mistake that can be made when building test problems that hurts the performance of A*