Mining optimal meeting points for moving users in spatio-temporal space

Abstract

Scheduling a meeting is a difficult task for people who have overbooked calendars and often have many constraints. This activity becomes further complex when the meeting is to be scheduled between parties who are situated in geographically distant locations of a city and have varying traveling patterns. To achieve this, we first propose a solution to determine optimal meeting location for two moving users in the Euclidean space. Then, we generalize the problem by considering variable number of moving users and evaluate optimal meeting point on the road network. We extend the work of Yan et al. (Proc VLDB Endow 4(11):1–11, 2011) in this domain by incorporating some real life constraints like variable number of users, varying travel patterns, flexible meeting point and considering road network distance. Experiments are performed on a real-world dataset and show that our method is effective in stated conditions.