Time-dependent route scheduling on road networks

Abstract

Navigation has been an important tool for human civilization for thousands of years, and the latest technologies like online map services and GPS satellites have brought it up to a new level. Now people can easily identify where we are on earth, find any places they want to go, and retrieve best routes to get there. Although there are plenty of tools that are convenient and fast enough for basic uses, it is still far from optimal. For example, most systems only consider various type of distances as the optimization goals, while the traveling time, which needs to consider traffic conditions, is a more appropriate one. However, it is both hard to acquire the traffic condition information and to compute time-dependent fastest paths. Therefore, in this article, we present an introduction to the time-dependent route scheduling, from speed profile generation to route scheduling and query answering.