TIPS: Mining Top-K Locations to Minimize User-Inconvenience for Trajectory-Aware Services
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Facility location problems aim to identify the best locations to set up new services. Majority of the existing works typically assume that the users of the service are static. However, there exists a wide array of services such as fuel stations, ATMs, food joints, etc., that are widely accessed by mobile users, besides the static ones. Such trajectory-aware services should, therefore, factor in the trajectories of its users rather than simply their static locations. In this work, we introduce the problem of optimal placement of facility locations for such trajectory-aware services that minimize the user inconvenience. The inconvenience of a user is defined as the extra distance traveled by her from her regular path to avail a service. We call this as the problem (Trajectory-aware Inconvenience-minimizing Placement of Services) and consider two variants of it. While the goal of the first variant (called MAX-TIPS) is to minimize the maximum inconvenience faced by any user, that of the second variant (called AVG-TIPS) is to minimize the average inconvenience. As both these problems are NP-hard, we propose multiple efficient heuristics to solve them. Empirical evaluation on real urban scale road networks validate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed heuristics. Time:
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