Dynamic Time-Dependent Route Planning in Road Networks with User Preferences

There has been tremendous progress in algorithmic methods for computing driving directions on road networks. Most of that work focuses on time-independent route planning, where it is assumed that the cost on each arc is constant per query. In practice, the current traffic situation significantly influences the travel time on large parts of the road network, and it changes over the day. One can distinguish between traffic congestion that can be predicted using historical traffic data, and congestion due to unpredictable events, e.g., accidents. In this work, we study the \emph{dynamic and time-dependent} route planning problem, which takes both prediction (based on historical data) and live traffic into account. To this end, we propose a practical algorithm that, while robust to user preferences, is able to integrate global changes of the time-dependent metric~(e.g., due to traffic updates or user restrictions) faster than previous approaches, while allowing subsequent queries that enable interactive applications

Consumption Profiles in Route Planning for Electric Vehicles: Theory and Applications

In route planning for electric vehicles (EVs), consumption profiles are a functional representation of optimal energy consumption between two locations, subject to initial state of charge. Efficient computation of profiles is a relevant problem on its own, but also a fundamental ingredient to many route planning approaches for EVs. In this work, we show that the complexity of a profile is at most linear in the graph size. Based on this insight, we derive a polynomial-time algorithm for the problem of finding an energy-optimal path between two locations that allows stops at charging stations. Exploiting efficient profile search, our approach also allows partial recharging at charging stations to save energy. In a sense, our results close the gap between efficient techniques for energy-optimal routes (based on simpler models) and NP-hard time-constrained problems involving charging stops for EVs. We propose a practical implementation, which we carefully integrate with Contraction Hierarchies and A* search. Even though the practical variant formally drops correctness, a comprehensive experimental study on a realistic, large-scale road network reveals that it always finds the optimal solution in our tests and computes even long-distance routes with charging stops in less than 300 ms

Modeling and Engineering Constrained Shortest Path Algorithms for Battery Electric Vehicles

We study the problem of computing constrained shortest paths for battery electric vehicles. Since battery capacities are limited, fastest routes are often infeasible. Instead, users are interested in fast routes where the energy consumption does not exceed the battery capacity. For that, drivers can deliberately reduce speed to save energy. Hence, route planning should provide both path and speed recommendations. To tackle the resulting NP-hard optimization problem, previous work trades correctness or accuracy of the underlying model for practical running times. In this work, we present a novel framework to compute optimal constrained shortest paths for electric vehicles that uses more realistic physical models, while taking speed adaptation into account. Careful algorithm engineering makes the approach practical even on large, realistic road networks: We compute optimal solutions in less than a second for typical battery capacities, matching performance of previous inexact methods. For even faster performance, the approach can easily be extended with heuristics that provide high quality solutions within milliseconds

On the Complexity of Partitioning Graphs for Arc-Flags

Precomputation of auxiliary data in an additional off-line step is a common approach towards improving the performance of shortest-path queries in large-scale networks. One such technique is the arc-flags algorithm, where the preprocessing involves computing a partition of the input graph. The quality of this partition significantly affects the speed-up observed in the query phase. It is evaluated by considering the search-space size of subsequent shortest-path queries, in particular its maximum or its average over all queries. In this paper, we substantially strengthen existing hardness results of Bauer et al. and show that optimally filling this degree of freedom is NP-hard for trees with unit-length edges, even if we bound the height or the degree. On the other hand, we show that optimal partitions for paths can be computed efficiently and give approximation algorithms for cycles and trees

Scalable Exact Visualization of Isocontours in Road Networks via Minimum-Link Paths

Isocontours in road networks represent the area that is reachable from a source within a given resource limit. We study the problem of computing accurate isocontours in realistic, large-scale networks. We propose isocontours represented by polygons with minimum number of segments that separate reachable and unreachable components of the network. Since the resulting problem is not known to be solvable in polynomial time, we introduce several heuristics that run in (almost) linear time and are simple enough to be implemented in practice. A key ingredient is a new practical linear-time algorithm for minimum-link paths in simple polygons. Experiments in a challenging realistic setting show excellent performance of our algorithms in practice, computing near-optimal solutions in a few milliseconds on average, even for long ranges

Energy-Optimal Routes for Electric Vehicles

Abstract. We study the problem of electric vehicle route planning, where an important aspect is computing paths that minimize energy consumption. Thereby, any method must cope with specific properties, such as recuperation, battery constraints (over- and under-charging), and frequently changing cost functions (e. g., due to weather conditions). This work presents a practical algorithm that quickly computes energy-optimal routes for networks of continental scale. Exploiting multi-level overlay graphs [26, 31], we extend the Customizable Route Planning approach [8] to our scenario in a sound manner. This includes the efficient computation of profile queries and the adaption of bidirectional search to battery constraints. Our experimental study uses detailed consumption data measured from a production vehicle (Peugeot iOn). It reveals for the network of Europe that a new cost function can be incorporated in about five seconds, after which we answer random queries within 0.3ms on average. Additional evaluation on an artificial but realistic [22, 36] vehicle model with unlimited range demonstrates the excellent scalability of our algorithm: Even for long-range queries across Europe it achieves query times below 5ms on average—fast enough for interactive applications. Altogether, our algorithm exhibits faster query times than previous approaches, while improving (metric-dependent) preprocessing time by three orders of magnitude.

UnLimited TRAnsfers for Multi-Modal Route Planning: An Efficient Solution

We study a multi-modal route planning scenario consisting of a public transit network and a transfer graph representing a secondary transportation mode (e.g., walking or taxis). The objective is to compute all journeys that are Pareto-optimal with respect to arrival time and the number of required transfers. While various existing algorithms can efficiently compute optimal journeys in either a pure public transit network or a pure transfer graph, combining the two increases running times significantly. As a result, even walking between stops is typically limited by a maximal duration or distance, or by requiring the transfer graph to be transitively closed. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a novel preprocessing technique called ULTRA (UnLimited TRAnsfers): Given a complete transfer graph (without any limitations, representing an arbitrary non-schedule-based mode of transportation), we compute a small number of transfer shortcuts that are provably sufficient for computing all Pareto-optimal journeys. We demonstrate the practicality of our approach by showing that these transfer shortcuts can be integrated into a variety of state-of-the-art public transit algorithms, establishing the ULTRA-Query algorithm family. Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that ULTRA is able to improve these algorithms from limited to unlimited transfers without sacrificing query speed, yielding the fastest known algorithms for multi-modal routing. This is true not just for walking, but also for other transfer modes such as cycling or driving