Predictive Querying in Spatio-Temporal Environment

Moving objects are spatial objects in which their positions change over the time. The process of storing the location information and processing queries efficiently on these moving objects are challenging problems in spatio-temporal databases. Many researches have been conducted to address the storing and querying problems related to moving objects. The majority of these researches concentrated on modifying and optimizing the indexing techniques for querying moving objects. These indexing approaches update and retrieve the locations of moving objects by traversing the nodes and inserting and deleting the nodes in the index structures. These insertion and deletion operations eventually lead to the rebuilding of the index structures in order to maintain query performance. However, periodic rebuilding of index structures can be expensive and it should be avoided if possible. To tackle this problem, we propose alternate method to query the positions of moving objects. The proposed method uses a double-grid structure that eliminates the need for insertion and deletion operations during updates and retrieval. The advantages of using a double-grid structure instead of indexing are the significant improvement in time for querying moving objects, and the elimination of the need to rebuild the grid structure.