Generating Node Coordinates for Shortest-Path Computations in Transportation Networks

Speed-up techniques that exploit given node coordinates have proven useful for shortest-path computations in transportation networks and geographic information systems. To facilitate the use of such techniques when coordinates are missing from some, or even all, of the nodes in a network we generate artificial coordinates using methods from graph drawing. Experiments on a large set of German train timetables indicate that the speed-up achieved with coordinates from our drawings is close to that achieved with the true coordinates---and in some special cases even better.