Visualising Top-k Alternative Routes

Abstract

Alternatives to the shortest path are a standard feature of modern navigation services where more than one suitable paths between source and destination are presented to the users so that they can use a path of their choice for navigation. Although there exist several approaches to compute top-k alternative paths, these techniques define suitable paths differently, hence, the top-k alternative routes generated by these techniques may be different. Unfortunately, there is no work that quantifies or experimentally compares the quality of the alternative routes generated by these techniques. This demonstration visualises the top-k alternative routes generated by two state-of-the-art techniques as well as the routes provided by Google Maps. The visualisation makes it easy for the users of the demonstration to compare the quality of the routes generated by each technique. The source code of the demonstration is also made publicly available which makes it easy to incorporate results by other techniques and mapping services and thus compare routes provided by these.