Efficient Routing on Large Road Networks Using Hierarchical Communities

Efficient routing is essential in everyday life. Although various hierarchical algorithms exist for computing shortest paths, their heavy precomputation/storage costs and/or query costs hinder their application to large road networks. By detecting a hierarchical community structure in road networks, we develop a community-based hierarchical graph model that supports efficient route computation on large road networks. We then propose a new hierarchical routing algorithm that can significantly reduce the search space over the conventional algorithms with acceptable loss of accuracy. Experimental results on a New York road network demonstrate the performance of the algorithm.