Geo-Social K-Cover Group queries for collaborative spatial computing

Abstract

In this paper, we study a new type of Geo-Social K-Cover Group (GSKCG) queries that, given a set of query points and a social network, retrieves a minimum user group in which each user is socially related to at least k other users and the users' associated regions (e.g., familiar regions or service regions) can jointly cover all the query points. Albeit its practical usefulness, the GSKCG query problem is NP-hard. We consequently explore a set of effective pruning strategies to derive an efficient algorithm for finding the optimal solution. Moreover, we design a novel index structure tailored to our problem to further accelerate query processing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our algorithm achieves desirable performance on real-life datasets.