Dijkstra's algorithm on-line: an empirical case study from public railroad transport

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 for optimal travel connections in real time. In practice, this problem is usually solved by heuristic variations of Dijkstra's algorithm, which do not guarantee an optimal result. We report results from a pilot study, in which we focused on the travel time as the only optimization criterion. In this study, various speed-up techniques for Dijkstra's algorithm were analysed empirically. This analysis was based on the timetable data of all German trains and on a "snapshot" of half a million customer queries.

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