Best neighbor heuristic search for finding minimum paths in transportation networks

For a wide range of transportation network path search problems, the A* heuristic significantly reduces both search effort and running time when compared to basic label-setting algorithms. The motivation for this research was to determine if additional savings could be attained by further experimenting with refinements to the A* approach. We propose a best neighbor heuristic improvement to the A* algorithm that yields additional benefits by significantly reducing the search effort on sparse networks. The level of reduction in running time improves as the average outdegree of the network decreases and the number of paths sought increases.