Transportation and Route Planning

Contents

Having established transportation planning and route planning as common concepts in the IPC benchmark suite, we now take an in-depth look at the complexity of solving such planning problems.

In the following Sect. 4.1, we introduce the general Transport and Route domains. In Sect. 4.2, we present some first upper bounds and general reductions. Section 4.3 discusses the plan existence problem and shows restricted fuel to be a major source of hardness for transportation and route planning. Section 4.4 shows that optimal planning or polynomial-time approximation schemes are beyond reach even for quite restricted domain variants. On the positive side, we see in Sect. 4.5 that constant-factor approximations are feasible in many cases. However, in many others they are not, which is shown in Sect. 4.6. Finally, Sect. 4.7 summarizes the findings of this chapter, and Sect. 4.8 puts them into a wider context.