Multi-Stage Improved Route Planning Approach: theoretical foundations

A new approach to the static route planning problem, based on a multi-staging concept and a scope notion, is presented. The main goal (besides implied efficiency of planning) of our approach is to address—with a solid theoretical foundation—the following two practically motivated aspects: a route comfort and a very limited storage space of a small navigation device, which both do not seem to be among the chief objectives of many other studies. We show how our novel idea can tackle both these seemingly unrelated aspects at once, and may also contribute to other established route planning approaches with which ours can be naturally combined. We provide a theoretical proof that our approach efficiently computes exact optimal routes within this concept, as well as we demonstrate with experimental results on publicly available road networks of the US the good practical performance of the solution.