Optimal location queries in road network databases

Optimal location (OL) queries are a type of spatial queries particularly useful for the strategic planning of resources. Given a set of existing facilities and a set of clients, an OL query asks for a location to build a new facility that optimizes a certain cost metric (defined based on the distances between the clients and the facilities). Several techniques have been proposed to address OL queries, assuming that all clients and facilities reside in an L_p space. In practice, however, movements between spatial locations are usually confined by the underlying road network, and hence, the actual distance between two locations can differ significantly from their L_p distance. Motivated by the deficiency of the existing techniques, this paper presents the first study on OL queries in road networks. We propose a unified framework that addresses three variants of OL queries that find important applications in practice, and we instantiate the framework with several novel query processing algorithms. We demonstrate the efficiency of our solutions through extensive experiments with real data.