Trip Planning Queries in Road Networks

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Mobility is a basic human characteristic. As a species we have always been moving about for a plethora of reasons. With today’s abundance of mobile communication devices, data about mobility can be collected relatively easily, thus providing large amounts of spatio-temporal data. Using such data intelligently can enable people to move more efficiently in several aspects, e.g., consuming less fuel by sharing rides more effectively and efficiently, spending less time in traffic, etc., thus moving towards so-called smart cities. A large number of traffic monitoring applications, social networks, etc., can leverage such data sources and aggregate further value to it. Moreover, this data can become rather complex and richer by considering non-spatio-temporal data, e.g., public events, weather patterns and path-popularity. Given this overarching theme, the proposed research program will focus on the topic of trip planning queries in road networks. A trip planning query considers a road network, a starting and a destination point, and a set of points-of-interest a traveller (or group thereof) wants to visit. There can be several variations of trip planning queries: points-of-interest may belong to different categories-of-interest (which may be needed to be traversed in an arbitrary, full or partial order) or one may have to account for opening hours of points-of-interest along with traffic conditions or public transportation schedules, maximum distance between point-of-interest or from pre-determined paths to potential points-of-interest, etc.