Application of An Improved A* Algorithm in Route Planning

The A* algorithm is a kind of heuristic algorithm which has been used widely in route planning, and the heuristic function plays an important part in the algorithm. Through the analysis of the problems in A* algorithm, the paper makes some improvement for A* algorithm as bellow, one is that the cost function takes the distance and direction as two heuristic elements, and the paper solves the problem that they have different units by normalization; another is the paper uses an k-d tree structure in the implementation of the A* algorithm, loads the nodes information dynamically, and reduces consumption of the memory The experimental results show that the efficiency of A* algorithm has been unproved greatly.