Abstract

Recently, with the increasing interest in using handheld devices, the application of navigation systems that provide driving information to the drivers has become widespread in daily life. An efficient route guidance system should consider the influential factors of traffic flow such as traffic density and allowable velocity limits of the roads. As the number of influential factors and amount of nodes in road network increase, the computational cost increases. On navigation systems, using handheld devices with limited processing speed and memory capacity, it is not feasible to find the exact optimal solution in real-time for the road networks with excessive number of nodes using deterministic methods such as Dijkstra algorithm. This paper proposes a Genetic Algorithm approach applied to a route guidance system to find the shortest driving time. Constant length chromosomes have been used for encoding the problem. It was found that the mutation operator proposed in this algorithm provided great contribution to achieve optimum solution by maintaining the genetic diversity. The efficiency of the genetic algorithm was tested by applying it on the networks with different sizes.

Key words: Genetic algorithm, navigation, route guidance, optimization, shortest path, shortest driving time.