{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/why-is-my-route-different-today-an-algorithm","title":"Why is My Route Different Today? An Algorithm for Explaining Route Selection","arxiv_id":"2506.05604","date":"2025-06-05","proceeding":null,"authors":["Aaron Schild","Sreenivas Gollapudi","Anupam Gupta","Kostas Kollias","Ali Sinop"],"abstract":"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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05604v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05604v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"why-is-my-route-different-today-an-algorithm","repo_url":"https://github.com/google-research/google-research","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}