Incremental nearest-neighbor search in moving objects

In databases of moving objects it is important to answer queries that concern the future positions of the objects. An important query type in such an environment is the nearest-neighbor query, which asks for the k closest objects of a query object during a time interval [t/sub s/, t/sub e/]. However, there are cases where the (k+1)-th nearest-neighbor is requested after the execution of the k-NN query. In such a case, either the query must be evaluated again, or we can exploit the previous result and use an incremental method to determine the new answer. We focus on the second alternative and present efficient incremental algorithms that outperform the trivial method which is based on complete re-execution of the query. In addition, we study the problem of keeping the query result consistent in the presence of object insertions, deletions and updates which are very common in a dynamic moving-object environment.