Map matching queries on realistic input graphs under the Fréchet distance

Map matching is a common preprocessing step for analysing vehicle trajectories. In the theory community, the most popular approach for map matching is to compute a path on the road network that is the most spatially similar to the trajectory, where spatial similarity is measured using the Fréchet distance. A shortcoming of existing map matching algorithms under the Fréchet distance is that every time a trajectory is matched, the entire road network needs to be reprocessed from scratch. An open problem is whether one can preprocess the road network into a data structure, so that map matching queries can be answered in sublinear time.

In this paper, we investigate map matching queries under the Fréchet distance. We provide a negative result for geometric planar graphs. We show that, unless SETH fails, there is no data structure that can be constructed in polynomial time that answers map matching queries in O((pq)^{1 − δ}) query time for any δ > 0, where p and q are the complexities of the geometric planar graph and the query trajectory, respectively. We provide a positive result for realistic input graphs, which we regard as the main result of this paper. We show that for c-packed graphs, one can construct a data structure of \(\tilde{O}(cp) \) size that can answer (1 + ε)-approximate map matching queries in \(\tilde{O}(c^4 q \log ^4 p) \) time, where \(\tilde{O}(\cdot) \) hides lower-order factors and dependence on ε.