Incremental k-Nearest-Neighbor Search on Road Networks

Most query search on road networks is either to find objects within a certain range (range search) or to find K nearest neighbors (KNN) on the actual road network map. In this paper, we propose a novel query, that is, incremental k nearest neighbor (iKNN). iKNN can be defined as given a set of candidate interest objects, a query point and the number of objects k, find a path which starts at the query point, goes through k interest objects and the distance of this path is the shortest among all possible paths. This is a new type of query, which can be used when we want to visit k interest objects one by one from the query point. This approach is based on expanding the network from the query point, keeping the results in a query set and updating the query set when reaching network intersection or interest objects. The basic theory of this approach is Dijkstra's algorithm and the Incremental Network Expansion (INE) algorithm. Our experiment verified the applicability of the proposed approach to solve the queries, which involve finding incremental k nearest neighbor.