Direction and Time-Aware Location Selection for Mobile Users

Traditional location-based query services mainly rely on a location-radius model, which returns the locations within a given spatial range. However, this ignores the user’s movement direction and the temporal validity of locations, which limits its applicability in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a novel problem, namely Direction and Time aware Location Selection (DTLS). DTLS incorporates both the user’s movement direction and the desired time window, and aims to filter out locations that are either behind the user or not open during the query time. To solve the DTLS problem, we propose a branch-and-bound framework and design two upper-bound strategies to enhance pruning efficiency. In addition, a greedy algorithm is developed to further improve efficiency. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods. Moreover, a case study is provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed DTLS method.