Papers › Why is My Route Different Today? An Algorithm for Explaining Route Selection
Why is My Route Different Today? An Algorithm for Explaining Route Selection
Aaron Schild, Sreenivas Gollapudi, Anupam Gupta, Kostas Kollias, Ali Sinop
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Users of routing services like Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Waze frequently wonder why a given route is proposed. This question particularly arises when dynamic conditions like traffic and road closures cause unusual routes to be proposed. While many dynamic conditions may exist in a road network at any time, only a small fraction of those conditions are typically relevant to a given user's route. In this work, we introduce the concept of a simple valid explanation (SVE), which consists of a small set of traffic-laden road segments that answer the following question: Which traffic conditions cause a particular shortest traffic-aware route to differ from the shortest traffic-free route? We give an efficient algorithm for finding SVEs and show that they theoretically and experimentally lead to small and interpretable answers to the question.
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