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

TL;DR

This paper introduces a practical algorithm for dynamic, time-dependent route planning in road networks that accounts for live traffic updates and user preferences, enabling faster and interactive route computations.

Contribution

It presents a novel algorithm that efficiently integrates global traffic changes and user preferences for dynamic route planning, improving responsiveness over previous methods.

Findings

Faster update times for global traffic changes

Supports interactive, real-time route queries

Effectively incorporates user preferences into planning

Abstract

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.