Efficient one-click browsing of large trajectory sets

Abstract

Traffic researchers, planners, and analysts want a simple way to query the large quantities of GPS trajectories collected from vehicles. In addition, users expect the results to be presented immediately even when querying very large transportation networks with huge trajectory data sets. This paper presents a novel query type called sheaf, where users can browse trajectory data sets using a single mouse click. Sheaves are very versatile and can be used for location-based advertising, travel-time analysis, intersection analysis, and reachability analysis (isochrones). A novel in-memory trajectory index compresses the data by a factor of 12.4 and enables execution of sheaf queries in 40 ms. This is up to 2 orders of magnitude faster than existing work. We demonstrate the simplicity, versatility, and efficiency of sheaf queries using a real-world trajectory set consisting of 2.7 million trajectories (1.36 billion GPS records) and a network with 1.5 million edges.