Historical traffic-tolerant paths in road networks

Historical traffic information is valuable for transportation analysis and planning, as well as for route search services. In view of these applications, we propose the k traffic-tolerant paths problem (TTP) on road networks, which takes a source-destination pair and historical traffic information as input, and returns k paths that minimize the aggregate (historical) travel time. Unlike the shortest path problem, the TTP problem has a combinatorial search space that renders the optimal solution expensive to compute. We propose an exact algorithm and a heuristic algorithm for this problem. Experiments on real traffic data demonstrate the effectiveness of TTP paths and the efficiency of our proposed algorithms.