Real-Time Route Search by Locations

With the proliferation of GPS-based data (e.g., routes and trajectories), it is of great importance to enable the functionality of real-time route search and recommendations. We define and study a novel Continuous Route-Search-by-Location (C-RSL) problem to enable real-time route search by locations for a large number of users over route data streams. Given a set of C-RSL queries where each query q contains a set of places q.O to visit and a threshold q.theta, we continuously feed each query q with routes that has similarity to q.O no less than q.theta. We also extend our proposal to support top-k C-RSL problem where each query continuously maintains k most similar routes. The C-RSL problem targets a variety of applications, including real-time route planning, ridesharing, and other location-based services that have real-time demand. To enable efficient route matching on a large number of C-RSL queries, we develop novel parallel route matching algorithms with good time complexity. Extensive experiments with real data offer insight into the performance of our algorithms, indicating that our proposal is capable of achieving high efficiency and scalability.