Fast Routing in Road Networks with Transit Nodes
Holger Bast,1
Stefan Funke,1
Peter Sanders,2*
Dominik Schultes2
When you drive to somewhere far away, you will leave your current location via one of only a few important traffic junctions. Starting from this informal observation, we developed an algorithmic approach, transit node routing, that allows us to reduce quickest path queries in road networks to a small number of table lookups. For road maps of Western Europe and the United States, our best query times improved over the best previously published figures by two orders of magnitude. This is also more than one million times faster than the best known algorithm for general networks.
1 Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany.
2 Universität Karlsruhe (TH), 76128 Karlsruhe, Germany.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: sanders{at}ira.uka.de
