Tactical Route Planning: New Algorithms for Decomposing the Map - Tools with Artificial Intelligence, 1995. Proceedings., Seventh International Conference on

This paper defines a n e w approach and investigates a fundamen ta l problem in route planners. This capability is impor tan t f o r robotic vehicles( M a r t i a n Rovers , etc.) and f o r planning off-road mi l i tary maneuvers. T h e emphas is throughout this paper will be on the design and analysis and hierarchical implementa t ion of our route p lanner . This work was motivated by anticipation of t he need t o search a grid of a trill ion poin ts f o r o p t i m u m routes. This cannot be done s imply by scaling upward f r o m t h e algorithms used t o search a grid of 10,000 points. A lgor i thms SUDc ien t f o r t he sma l l grid are totally inadequate f o r the large grid. Soon, t he challenge will be t o compzGte ofroad routes more t h a n 100 k m long and w i t h a one or two-me ter grid. Prev ious efforts are reviewed and the data structures, decomposition methods and search algorithms are analyzed and l imi ta t ions are discussed. A detailed discussion of a hierarchical imp lemen ta t ion i s provided and the experimental results are analyzed. T h e principal contributions of t he paper are (1) n e w algorithms f o r decomposing the m a p nnd new search methods , (2) analysis of n e w approaches, and (3) the use of expert sys tems , deductive databases and mediators. Exper imenta l results are included of a detailed implementa t ion . *This work was supported by the Army Research Office under Grant Nr. DAAL-03-92-G-0225 and by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nr. IRI-9109755. V.S. Subrahmanian Department of Computer Science & Institute for Advanced Computer Studies University of Maryland College Park, Maryland 207.42.