In Search of the Max Coverage Region in Road Networks

The widespread use of mobile devices has resulted in the generation of vast amounts of spatial data. The availability of such large-scale spatial data facilitates the development of data-driven approaches to address real-life problems. This paper introduces the max coverage region (MCR) problem in road networks and provides efficient solutions. Given a set of spatial objects and a coverage radius, the MCR problem aims to identify a location from the road network, so that we can reach as many spatial objects as possible within the given coverage radius from the location. This problem is fundamental to supporting many real-world applications. Given a road network and a set of sensors, this problem can be used to find the best location for a sensor maintenance station. This problem can also be applied in medical research, such as in a protein–protein interaction network, where the nodes represent proteins, the edges represent their interactions, and the weight of an edge represents confidence. We can use the MCR problem to find the set of interacting proteins with a confidence budget. We propose an efficient exact solution to solve the problem, where we reduce the MCR problem to an equivalent problem named the most overlapped interval and design an edge-level upper bound estimation method to reduce the search space. Furthermore, we propose two approximate solutions that sacrifice a little accuracy for much better efficiency. Our experimental study on real-road network datasets demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approaches.