Highway Hierarchies Hasten Exact Shortest Path Queries

We present a new speedup technique for route planning that exploits the hierarchy inherent in real world road networks. Our algorithm preprocesses the eight digit number of nodes needed for maps of the USA or Western Europe in a few hours using linear space. Shortest (i.e. fastest) path queries then take around eight milliseconds to produce exact shortest paths. This is about 2 000 times faster than using Dijkstra’s algorithm.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ESA
• Authors: Peter Sanders, Dominik Schultes
• Keywords: Digit Number, ESA 2005, Exact Shortest Paths, World Road Networks