Highway Hierarchies Demo

Dominik Schultes
Algorithmik II (Group of Prof. Sanders)
Institut für Theoretische Informatik

Schwerpunkt Nr. 1126

We have developed a Java program to demonstrate the functioning of our highway hierarchy approach. You can start it as

Java Applet (in resolution 1024 x 768) in your browser [alternatively, in resolution 800 x 600] or
download the program and execute it as application.

Notes

When you start the applet, depending on your browser and your Java version, there might be some security alert stating that the applet comes from an untrustworthy source. Actually the applet is provided by myself and you have to decide whether you want to trust me or not. If you click 'yes', everything should work.
When downloading the program, please make sure that the suffix of the filename is not changed. The filename should be HHClientDE.jar. (It has been reported that the Internet Explorer tries to rename it to a zip-file, which should not be allowed.)
After having downloaded the program, you can start it by the command java -jar HHClientDE.jar. Using Windows or Mac OS X, a double-click should also work.
Notes on the usage of the program can be found by clicking on the info button (top left corner) of the program.
Both the actual route planning and the compilation of the visualisation data is done on our server. The Java applet/application only offers the graphical user interface. If you use the program as application, please make sure that your firewall allows outgoing connections to our server. A broad-band internet connection is highly recommended.
Due to some memory limitations on our webserver, at the moment only the German road map is available.
If you encounter problems while keying in a city name, pressing the reload-button of your browser might help.
Bug reports are very welcome. Please send them to mail@dominik-schultes.de.
When you submit a route planning request, you might observe that it takes quite a while (several seconds) until the result is visualised. It is important to distinguish between the computation time that is needed to determine the shortest path and the time that is needed to compile the visualisation data, send them via the internet to the client application and actually draw them. The former part is very fast (only a few milliseconds), which is the focus of our research. Only the latter part causes the delays.
By this demo, we want to offer some insights into the working method of our Highway Hierarchy approach; for example, you can see the structure of the highway hierarchy and the development of the search space. At this point, we do not aim to provide a complete route planning system. For instance, our maps do not contain any labels of cities or streets. This functionality would be beyond our research scope.

Visualisation of Very Large Graphs

This graphical demo is based on a student research project Visualisation of Very Large Graphs (Visualisierung sehr großer Graphen) by Timo Bingmann, Universität Karlsruhe, 2006.

abstract
full paper (pdf, 2.4 MB, in German)
slides (pdf, 1.6 MB, in English)

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