Hierarchical time-dependent shortest path algorithms for vehicle routing under ITS

The development of efficient algorithms for vehicle routing on time-dependent networks is one of the major challenges in routing under intelligent transportation systems. Existing vehicle routing navigation systems, whether built-in or portable, lack the ability to rely on online servers. Such systems must compute the route in a stand-alone mode with limited hardware processing/memory capacity given an origin/destination pair and departure time. In this article, we propose a computationally efficient, yet effective, hierarchical algorithm to solve the time-dependent shortest path problem. Our proposed algorithm exploits community-based hierarchical representations of road networks, and it recursively reduces the search space in each level of the hierarchy by using our proposed search strategy algorithm. Our proposed algorithm is efficient in terms of finding shortest paths in milliseconds for large-scale road networks while eliminating the need to store preprocessed shortest paths, shortcuts, lower bounds, etc. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm using data from Detroit, New York, and San Francisco road networks.