Precomputation Techniques for the Stochastic On-Time Arrival Problem

We consider the stochastic on-time arrival (SOTA) problem of finding the optimal routing strategy for reaching a given destination within a pre-specified time budget and provide the first results on using preprocessing techniques for speeding up the query time. We start by identifying some properties of the SOTA problem that limit the types of preprocessing techniques that can be used in this setting, and then define the stochastic variants of two deterministic shortest path preprocessing techniques that can be adapted to the SOTA problem, namely reach and arc-flags. We present the preprocessing and query algorithms for each technique, and also present an extension to the standard reach based preprocessing method that provides additional pruning. Finally, we explain the limitations of this approach due to the inefficiency of the preprocessing phase and present a fast heuristic preprocessing scheme. Numerical results for San Francisco, Luxembourg and a synthetic road network show up to an order of magnitude improvement in the query time for short queries, with even larger gains expected for longer queries.