Distributed Multimodal Path Queries

Multimodal path queries over transportation networks are receiving increasing attention due to their widespread applications. A multimodal path query consists of finding multimodal journeys from source to destination in transportation networks, including unrestricted walking, driving, cycling, and schedule-based public transportation. Transportation networks are generally continent-sized. This characteristic highlights the need for parallel computing to accelerate multimodal path queries. Meanwhile, transportation networks are often fragmented and distributively stored on different machines. This situation calls for exploiting parallel computing power for these distributed systems. Therefore, in this paper, we study distributed multimodal path (DMP) queries over large transportation networks. We develop algorithms to explore parallel computation. When evaluating a DMP query Q on a distributed multimodal graph Gmult, we show that the algorithms possess the following performance guarantees, irrespective of how Gmult is fragmented and distributed: (1) each machine is visited only once; (2) the total network traffic is determined by the size of Q and the fragmentation of Gmult; (3) the response time is decided by the largest fragment of Gmult; and (4) the algorithm is parallel scalable. Using real-life and synthetic data, we experimentally verify that the algorithms are scalable on large graphs.