Optimized Customizable Route Planning in Large Road Networks with Batch Processing

TL;DR

This paper enhances large-scale road network route planning by optimizing path storage and reconstruction within the Customizable Tree Labeling framework, employing batch processing to improve scalability and query efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces new algorithms for efficient path information storage and reconstruction, along with a batch processing strategy to improve scalability in large road networks.

Findings

Significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

Effective trade-offs between memory usage and query speed.

Validated on 13 real-world road networks.

Abstract

Modern route planners such as Google Maps and Apple Maps serve millions of users worldwide, optmizing routes in large-scale road networks where fast responses are required under diverse cost metrics including travel time, fuel consumption, and toll costs. Classical algorithms like Dijkstra or A$^*$ are too slow at this scale, and while index-based techniques achieve fast queries, they are often tied to fixed metrics, making them unsuitable for dynamic conditions or user-specific metrics. Customizable approaches address this limitation by separating metric-independent preprocessing and metric-dependent customization, but they remain limited by slower query performance. Notably, Customizable Tree Labeling (CTL) was recently introduced as a promising framework that combines tree labelings with shortcut graphs. The shortcut graph enables efficient customization to different cost metrics, while tree labeling, supported by path arrays, provides fast query answering. Although CTL enables optimizing routes under different cost metrics, it still faces challenges in storing and reconstructing path information efficiently, which hinders its scalability for answering millions of queries. In this article, we build on the Customizable Tree Labeling framework to introduce new optimizations for the storage and reconstruction of path information. We develop several algorithmic variants that differ in the information retained within shortcut graphs and path arrays, offering a spectrum of trade-offs between memory usage and query performance. To further enhance scalability, we propose a batch processing strategy that shares path information across queries to eliminate redundant computation. Empirically, we have evaluated the performance of our algorithms on 13 real-world road networks. The results show that they significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods.