Deep Learning-Based Alternative Route Computation

Algorithms for the computation of alternative routes in road networks power many geographic navigation systems. A good set of alternative routes offers meaningful options to the user of the system and can support applications such as routing that is robust to failures (e.g., road closures, extreme traffic congestion, etc.) and routing with diverse preferences and objective functions. Algorithmic techniques for alternative route computation include the penalty method, via-node type algorithms (which deploy bidirectional search and finding plateaus), and, more recently, electrical-circuit based algorithms. In this work we focus on the practically important family of via-node type algorithms and we aim to produce high quality alternative routes for road netowrks. We study alternative route computation in the presence of a fast routing infrastructure that relies on hierarchical routing (namely, CRP). We propose new approaches that rely on deep learning methods. Our training methodology utilizes the hierarchical partition of the graph and builds models to predict which boundary road segments in the partition should be crossed by the alternative routes. We describe our methods in detail and evaluate them against the previously studied architectures, as well as against a stronger baseline that we define in this work, showing improvements in quality in the road networks of Seattle, Paris, and Bangalore.

• Algorithms and Theory