The safest path via safe zones

Abstract

© 2015 IEEE. We define and study Euclidean and spatial network variants of a new path finding problem: given a set of safe zones, find paths that minimize the distance traveled outside the safe zones. In this problem, the entire space with the exception of the safe zones is unsafe, but passable, and it differs from problems that involve unsafe regions to be strictly avoided. As a result, existing algorithms are not effective solutions to the new problem. To solve the Euclidean variant, we devise a transformation of the continuous data space with safe zones into a discrete graph upon which shortest path algorithms apply. A naïve transformation yields a very large graph that is expensive to se..