Graph-Indexed kNN Query Optimization on Road Network

The nearest neighbors query problem on road networks constitutes a crucial aspect of location-oriented services and has useful practical implications; e.g., it can locate the k-nearest hotels. However, researches who study road networks still encounter obstacles due to the method’s inherent limitations with respect to object mobility. More popular methods employ indexes to store intermediate results to improve querying time efficiency, but these other methods are often accompanied by high time costs. To balance the costs of time and space, a lightweight flow graph index is proposed to reduce the quantity of candidate nodes, and with this index the results of a kNN query can be efficiently obtained. Experiments on real road networks confirm the efficiency and accuracy of our optimized algorithm.