Finding the optimal path over multi-cost graphs

Yajun Yang, Jeffrey Xu Yu, Hong Gao, Jianzhong Li

Abstract: Shortest path query is an important problem in graphs and has been well-studied. However, most approaches for shortest path query are based on single-cost (weight) graphs. In this paper, we introduce the definition of multi-cost graph and study a novel query: the optimal path query over multi-cost graphs. We propose a best-first branch and bound search algorithm with two optimizing strategies. Furthermore, we propose a novel index named k-cluster index to make our method more space and time efficient for large graphs. We discuss how to construct and utilize k-cluster index. We confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithms using real-life datasets in experiments.