NetClus: A Scalable Framework for Locating Top-K Sites for Placement of Trajectory-Aware Services

TL;DR

NetClus is a scalable framework for locating top-k sites for mobile user services on road networks, efficiently handling large datasets and dynamic updates, outperforming traditional heuristics in response time and memory usage.

Contribution

The paper introduces NetClus, a multi-resolution clustering framework that efficiently solves the NP-hard TOPS problem for trajectory-aware site placement at urban scale.

Findings

NetClus achieves comparable solution quality to greedy heuristics.

NetClus provides fast response times and low memory usage.

NetClus effectively handles dynamic updates and constraints.

Abstract

Facility location queries identify the best locations to set up new facilities for providing service to its users. Majority of the existing works in this space assume that the user locations are static. Such limitations are too restrictive for planning many modern real-life services such as fuel stations, ATMs, convenience stores, cellphone base-stations, etc. that are widely accessed by mobile users. The placement of such services should, therefore, factor in the mobility patterns or trajectories of the users rather than simply their static locations. In this work, we introduce the TOPS (Trajectory-Aware Optimal Placement of Services) query that locates the best k sites on a road network. The aim is to optimize a wide class of objective functions defined over the user trajectories. We show that the problem is NP-hard and even the greedy heuristic with an approximation bound of (1-1/e) fails to scale on urban-scale datasets. To overcome this challenge, we develop a multi-resolution clustering based indexing framework called NetClus. Empirical studies on real road network trajectory datasets show that NetClus offers solutions that are comparable in terms of quality with those of the greedy heuristic, while having practical response times and low memory footprints. Additionally, the NetClus framework can absorb dynamic updates in mobility patterns, handle constraints such as site-costs and capacity, and existing services, thereby providing an effective solution for modern urban-scale scenarios.