Efficient Iϵ/I-Approximate Ik/I-Flexible Aggregate Nearest Neighbor Search for Arbitrary Iϵ/I in Road Networks

Recently, complicated spatial search algorithms have emerged as spatial-information-based applications, such as location-based services (LBS), and have become very diverse and frequent. The aggregate nearest neighbor (ANN) search is an extension of the existing nearest neighbor (NN) search; it finds the object p[sup.*] that minimizes G{d(p[sup.*] ,q[sub.i] ),q[sub.i] ∈Q} from a set Q of M (≥1) query objects, where G is an aggregate function and d() is the distance between two objects. The flexible aggregate nearest neighbor (FANN) search is an extension of the ANN search by introducing flexibility factor ϕ (0