A polyhedra-based model for moving regions in databases

Abstract

ABSTRACT Moving objects databases store and process objects with a focus on their spatiotemporal behaviour. To achieve this, the model of the data must be suitable to efficiently store and process moving objects. Currently, a unit-based model is widely used, where each moving object is divided into one or more time intervals, during which the object behaves uniformly. This model is also used for a data type called moving regions, which resembles moving and shape changing regions as, for example, forest fires or cloud fields. However, this model struggles to support operations like union, difference or intersection of two moving regions; the resulting objects are unnecessarily bloated and uncomfortable to handle because the resulting number of units is generally very high. In this paper, an alternative model for moving regions is proposed, which is based on polyhedra. Furthermore, this work develops an isomorphism between moving regions and polyhedra including all relevant operations, which has the additional advantage that several implementations for those are already readily available; this is demonstrated by a reference implementation using the existing and well-tested Computational Geometry Algorithms Library (CGAL).