Reachability Queries with Transfer Decay

A spatiotemporal reachability query identifies whether a physical item (or information, virus etc.) could have been transferred from the source moving object O-S to the target moving object O-T during a time interval I (either directly, or through a chain of intermediate transfers). Previous work on spatiotemporal reachability queries, assumes the transferred information remains the same. This paper introduces a novel reachability query under the scenario of information decay. Such queries arise when the value of information (virus load etc.) that travels through the chain of intermediate objects decreases with each transfer. To address such queries efficiently over large spatiotemporal datasets, we introduce the RICCdecay algorithm. An experimental evaluation shows the efficiency of the proposed algorithm over previous approaches.