Towards Efficient Path Skyline Computation in Bicriteria Networks

Path skyline query is a fundamental problem in bicriteria network analysis and is widely applied in a variety of applications. Given a source s and a destination t in a bicriteria network G, path skyline query aims to identify all the skyline paths from s to t in G. In the literature, PSQ is a fundamental algorithm for path skyline query and is also used as a building block for the afterwards proposed algorithms. In PSQ, a key operation is to record the skyline paths from s to v for each node v that is possible on the skyline paths from s to t. However, to obtain the skyline paths for v, PSQ has to maintain other paths that are not skyline paths for v, which makes PSQ inefficient. Motivated by this, in this paper, we propose a new algorithm PSQ(+) for the path skyline query. By adopting an ordered path exploring strategy, our algorithm can totally avoid the fruitless path maintenance problem in PSQ. We evaluate our proposed algorithm on real networks and the experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed algorithm. Besides, the experimental results also demonstrate the algorithm that uses PSQ as a building block for the path skyline query can achieve a significant performance improvement after we substitute PSQ(+) for PSQ.