History oblivious route recovery on road networks

Abstract

The availability of GPS sensors in vehicles has enabled the collection of trajectory data that can be utilized to improve the quality of location-based services. However, mostly due to privacy concerns, many data sets are published without containing entire trajectories but only the source location, the target location and the duration of recorded trips. In this paper, we study the problem of route recovery from trip data. In contrast to recent works that assume the availability of entire trajectories for past trips, we investigate methods for route recovery in the absence of such historical data, and we present methods for recovering the single most likely route that a vehicle has travelled. Furthermore, we introduce the region recovery problem that aims at determining a small region that is very likely to contain the traveled route. We also introduce region recovery methods for both single trips and trip groups. In a comprehensive experimental evaluation, we study the efficacy of our solutions for both the route and the region recovery problem. For the region recovery problem in particular, we demonstrate the pros and cons of each method along with the trade-off they offer between the size of the recovered region and the likelihood that the region contains the actual route.