Efficient processing of optimal meeting point queries in Euclidean space and road networks

Finding an optimal meeting point (OMP) for a group of people (or a set of objects) at different locations is an important problem in spatial query processing. There are many real-life applications related to this problem, such as determining the location of a conference venue, deciding the pick-up location of a tourist bus, and planing tactics of artificial intelligence in real-time strategy games. Formally, given a set \(Q\) of query points in a spatial setting \(P\), an OMP query fetches the point \(o\in P\) that minimizes a cost function defined over the distances from \(o\) to all points in \(Q\). Since there are infinitely many locations in a given space setting, it is infeasible to examine all of them to find the OMP, and thus, the problem is challenging. In this paper, we study OMP queries in the following two spatial settings which are common in real-life applications: Euclidean space and road networks. In the setting of Euclidean space, we propose a general framework for answering all OMP query variants and also identify the best algorithms for particular types of OMP queries in the literature. In the setting of road networks, we study how to access only part of the road network and examine part of the candidates. Specifically, we explore two pruning techniques, namely Euclidean distance bound and threshold algorithm, which help improve the efficiency of OMP query processing. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed approaches on both real and synthetic datasets.