Flight Radius Algorithms

Abstract

In this article, we present the flight radius problem (FRP) on the condensed flight network (CFN). Then, giving a specific flight that is defined by an origin and destination (OD) pair, the problem consists in finding routes that connect the OD pair and satisfy a regret constraint on time, distance or cost. The found routes help airline manager to find business opportunities. This problem arises in the real world, for instance in some air transportation companies. The FRP is formulated as finding a maximal subgraph of nodes belonging to routes satisfying a regret constraint. Such routes can be found using shortest paths algorithms (SPA). The CFN is generated using a time-independent approach and stored in the graph database Neo4j. Implementing SPA in Neo4j is challenging since the graph database stores the weights of the graph in a separate data structure. In this paper, we propose four methods to solve the FRP: these methods combine parallel and sequential processing with more optimization to overcome time and memory costs. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that the best algorithm is the extended Dijkstra algorithm which meets the real-time constraints of the targeted industrial application.