Rendezvous on street networks

We present an algorithm for finding a distance optimal rendezvous location with respect to both initial and target locations of two mobile agents. These agents can be humans or robots, who need to meet and split while performing a collaborative task. Our aim is to embed the meeting process within a background activity such that the agents travel through the same rendezvous location while taking the shortest paths to their respective target locations. We analyze this problem in a street network scenario where the agents are given their individual scheduled routes to complete with an underlying common goal. The total number of path combinations that the agents need to evaluate for the shortest path increases rapidly with the number of waypoints along their routes. We address this computational cost by proposing a combination of Euclidean and street network distances for a trade-off between the number of queries and a distance optimal solution.