Dijkstra's Algorithm On-Line: An Empirical Case Study from Public Railroad Transport

  • Authors:
  • Frank Schulz;Dorothea Wagner;Karsten Weihe

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • WAE '99 Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Algorithm Engineering
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Traffic information systems are among the most prominent real-world applications of Dijkstra's algorithm for shortest paths. We consider the scenario of a central information server in the realm of public railroad transport on wide-area networks. Such a system has to process a large number of on-line queries in real time. In practice, this problem is usually solved by heuristical variations of Dijkstra's algorithm, which do not guarantee optimality. We report results from a pilot study, in which we focused on the travel time as the only optimization criterion. In this study, various optimality-preserving speed-up techniques for Dijkstra's algorithm were analyzed empirically. This analysis was based on the timetable data of all German trains and on a "snapshot" of half a million customer queries.1