Several variations of nearest neighbor (NN) query have been investigated by the database community. However, realworld applications often result in the formulation of new variations of the NN problem demanding new solutions. In this paper, we study an unexploited and novel form of NN queries named Optimal Sequenced Route (OSR) query in both vector and metric spaces. OSR strives to find a route of minimum length starting from a given source location and passing through a number of typed locations in a specific sequence imposed on the types of the locations. We first transform the OSR problem into a shortest path problem on a large planar graph. We show that a classic shortest path algorithm such as Dijkstra's is impractical for most real-world scenarios. Therefore, we propose LORD, a light thresholdbased iterative algorithm, that utilizes various thresholds to filter out the locations that cannot be in the optimal route. Then we propose R-LORD, an extension of LORD which uses R-tr...
Mehdi Sharifzadeh, Mohammad R. Kolahdouzan, Cyrus