Group meetup in the presence of obstacles

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce an obstructed group nearest neighbor (OGNN) query that enables a group of pedestrians to meet at a common point of interest (e.g., a restaurant) with the minimum aggregate travel distance in the presence of obstacles such as buildings and lakes. The aggregate travel distance can be measured in terms of the total, the maximum or the minimum travel distance of all group members. In recent years, researchers have focused on developing efficient algorithms for processing group nearest neighbor (GNN) queries in the Euclidean space and road networks, which ignores the impact of obstacles in computing travel distances. We propose the first comprehensive approach to proce..