Efficient Computation of the Optimal Accessible Location for a Group of Mobile Agents

Nowadays, people can access location-based services (LBSs) as a group via mobile devices to plan their daily activities with friends and relatives. In this article, we introduce an important class of group-oriented LBSs, group optimal accessible location (GOAL) queries that enable users to identify the location of a point of interest (POI) that has the minimum total distance to a given set of paths. GOAL queries have many applications, such as the selection of an optimal location for group meet-ups or for a mobile facility such as a food truck. In a GOAL query, each trip or path is represented as a set of line segments, and the distance of a POI from a path is computed as the minimum…