Efficiently Answering Probability Threshold-Based Shortest Path Queries over Uncertain Graphs

Efficiently processing shortest path (SP) queries over stochastic networks attracted a lot of research attention as such queries are very popular in the emerging real world applications such as Intelligent Transportation Systems and communication networks whose edge weights can be modeled as a random variable. Some pervious works aim at finding the most likely SP (the path with largest probability to be SP), and others search the least-expected-weight path. In all these works, the definitions of the shortest path query are based on simple probabilistic models which can be converted into the multi-objective optimal issues on a weighted graph. However, these simple definitions miss important information about the internal structure of the probabilistic paths and the interplay among all the uncertain paths. Thus, in this paper, we propose a new SP definition based on the possible world semantics that has been widely adopted for probabilistic data management, and develop efficient methods to find threshold-based SP path queries over an uncertain graph. Extensive experiments based on real data sets verified the effectiveness of the proposed methods.