SHARC: Fast and Robust Unidirectional Routing

During recent years, impressive speed-up techniques for Dijkstra’s have been developed. Unfortunately, the most advanced techniques use bidirectional search, which makes it hard to use them in scenarios where a backward search is prohibited. Even worse, such scenarios are widely spread (e.g., timetable-information systems or time-dependent networks).

In this work, we present a unidirectional speed-up technique, which competes with bidirectional approaches. Moreover, we show how to exploit the advantage of unidirectional routing for fast exact queries in timetable information systems and for fast approximative queries in time-dependent scenarios. By running experiments on several inputs other than road networks, we show that our approach is very robust to the input.