An Efficient Path Computation Approach for Road Networks Based on Hierarchical Communities

The problem of efficient path computation arises in several applications such as intelligent transportation and network routing. Although various algorithms exist for computing shortest paths, their heavy precomputation/ storage costs and/or query costs hinder their application to real-time routing. By detecting hierarchical community structure in road networks, we develop a community-based hierarchical graph model that supports efficient path computation on large road networks. We then propose a new hierarchical routing algorithm that can significantly reduce the search space over the conventional algorithms with acceptable loss of accuracy. Finally, we evaluate our approach experimentally using a large, real-world road network to show the gain in performance. © 2011 IFAC.