An Efficient Pre-computation Technique for Approximation Distance Query in Road Networks

The problem of computing minimum distance of moving objects in large-scale road networks has caught many researchers` attention in recent years. One of solutions is to reduce the complexity by selecting representative node for each node in graph, in which the mininum distance of two nodes can be obtained by computing the distance between their representative nodes. The distance between any two representative nodes is pre-computed. In this paper we propose an effective algorithm to select and allocate a fixed number of representative nodes in road networks, then analyse the relationship between the size of representative node set and the approximation distance error of node pairs. We evaluate our approach on a real data set. The evaluation result shows the size of representative nodes set affects the approximation distance error of node pairs, and the appropriate choice for size of representative nodes set could improve the performance of precomputation and make the result more accurate and reliable.