Why is My Route Different Today? An Algorithm for Explaining Route Selection
Abstract
Users of routing services like Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Waze frequently wonder why a given route is proposed. This question particularly arises when dynamic conditions like traffic and road closures cause unusual routes to be proposed. While many dynamic conditions may exist in a road network at any time, only a small fraction of those conditions are typically relevant to a given user's route. In this work, we introduce the concept of a simple valid explanation (SVE), which consists of a small set of traffic-laden road segments that answer the following question: Which traffic conditions cause a particular shortest traffic-aware route to differ from the shortest traffic-free route? We give an efficient algorithm for finding SVEs and show that they theoretically and experimentally lead to small and interpretable answers to the question.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2506.05604,
title = {Why is My Route Different Today? An Algorithm for Explaining Route Selection},
author = {Aaron Schild and Sreenivas Gollapudi and Anupam Gupta and Kostas Kollias and Ali Sinop},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.05604},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
To appear in the SIAM Conference on Applied and Computational Discrete Algorithms (ACDA) 2025. Code and data for the experiments can be found here: https://github.com/google-research/google-research/blob/master/explainable_routing