A Simplified Method to Estimate Travel Cost based on Traffic-Adaptable Heuristics for Accelerating Path Search

In the telematics system, a reasonable path search time should be guaranteed from a great number of user's queries, even though the optimal path with minimized travel time might be continuously changed by the traffic flows. Thus, the path search method should consider traffic flows of the roads and the search time as well. However, the existing path search methods are not able to cope efficiently with the change of the traffic flows and to search rapidly paths simultaneously. This paper proposes a new path search method for fast computation. It also reflects the traffic flows efficiently. Especially, in order to simplify the computation of variable heuristic values, it employs a simplification method for estimating values of traffic-adaptable heuristics. The experiments are carried out with the $A^*$ algorithm and the proposed method in terms of the execution time, the number of node accesses and the accuracy. The results obtained from the experiments show that the method achieves very fast execution time and the reasonable accuracy as well.