An Efficient Index Method for the Optimal Route Query over Multi-Cost Networks

Smart city has been consider the wave of the future and the route recommendation in networks is a fundamental problem in it. Most existing approaches for the shortest route problem consider that there is only one kind of cost in networks. However, there always are several kinds of cost in networks and users prefer to select an optimal route under the global consideration of these kinds of cost. In this paper, we study the problem of finding the optimal route in the multi-cost networks. We prove this problem is NP-hard and the existing index techniques cannot be used to this problem. We propose a novel partition-based index with contour skyline techniques to find the optimal route. We propose a vertex-filtering algorithm to facilitate the query processing. We conduct extensive experiments on six real-life networks and the experimental results show that our method has an improvement in efficiency by an order of magnitude compared to the previous heuristic algorithms.