Indexing the trajectories of moving objects in networks

The management of moving objects has been intensively studied in recent years. A wide and increasing range of database applications has to deal with spatial objects whose position changes continuously over time, called moving objects. The main interest of these applications is to efficiently store and query the positions of these continuously moving objects. To achieve this goal, index structures are required. The main proposals of index structures for moving objects deal with unconstrained 2-dimensional movement. Constrained movement is a special and a very important case of object movement. For example, cars move in roads and trains in railroads. In this paper we propose a new index structure for moving objects on networks, the MON-Tree. We describe two network models that can be indexed by the MON-Tree. The first model is edge oriented, i.e., the network consists of nodes and edges and there is a polyline associated to each edge. The second one is more suitable for transportation networks and is route oriented, i.e., the network consists of routes and junctions. In this model, a polyline also serves as a representation of the routes. We propose the index in terms of the basic algorithms for insertion and querying. We test our proposal in an extensive experimental evaluation with generated data sets using as underlying networks the roads of Germany. In our tests, the MON-Tree shows good scalabiliy and outperforms the competing index structures in updating (index creation) as well as in querying.