Maintaining Connectivity in Dynamic Multimodal Network Models

Network data models are frequently used as a mechanism to describe the connectivity between spatial features in many emerging GIS applications (location-based services, transportation design, navigational systems etc.) Connectivity information is required for solving a wide range of location based queries like finding the shortest path, service areas discovery, allocation and distance matrix computation. Nevertheless real life networks are dynamic in nature since spatial features can be periodically modified. Such updates may change the connectivity relations with the other features and connectivity needs to be reestablished. Existing approaches are not suitable for a dynamic environment, since whenever a feature change occurs, the whole network connectivity has to be reconstructed from scratch.