Robust Mobile Route Planning with Limited Connectivity

Abstract

We study the problem of route planning on mobile devices. There are two current approaches to this problem. One option is to have all the routing data on the device, which can then compute routes by itself. This makes it hard to incorporate traffic updates, leading to suboptimal routes. An alternative approach outsources the route computation to a server, which then sends only the route to the device. The downside is that a user is lost when deviating from the proposed route in an area with limited connectivity. In this work, we present an approach that combines the best of both worlds. The server performs the route computation but, instead of sending only the route to the user, it sends a corridor that is robust against deviations. We define these corridors properly and show that their size can be theoretically bounded in road networks. We evaluate their quality experimentally in terms of size and robustness on a continental road network. Finally, we introduce several algorithms to compute corridors efficiently. Our experimental analysis shows that our corridors are small but very robust against deviations, and can be computed quickly on a standard server.

Route Planning in Transportation Networks

“…Such paths can either be computed directly as the concatenation of partial shortest paths [6,60,77,173,184] or compactly represented as a small graph [17,174,213]. A related problem is to compute a corridor [86] of paths between source and target, which allows deviations from the best route (while driving) to be handled without recomputing the entire path. These robust routes can be useful in mobile scenarios with limited connectivity.…”

Pruning Techniques for the Stochastic on-time Arrival Problem\texorpdfstring -- An Experimental Study

“…Route Corridors. A related problem is considered in [7]. Here, the goal is to compute a corridor of paths from s to t that contain all arcs that are possibly visited when driving from s to t and performing up to k successive wrong turns.…”