  We consider a practical top-k route search problem: given a collection of
points of interest (POIs) with rated features and traveling costs between POIs,
a user wants to find k routes from a source to a destination and limited in a
cost budget, that maximally match her needs on feature preferences. One
challenge is dealing with the personalized diversity requirement where users
have various trade-off between quantity (the number of POIs with a specified
feature) and variety (the coverage of specified features). Another challenge is
the large scale of the POI map and the great many alternative routes to search.
We model the personalized diversity requirement by the whole class of
submodular functions, and present an optimal solution to the top-k route search
problem through indices for retrieving relevant POIs in both feature and route
spaces and various strategies for pruning the search space using user
preferences and constraints. We also present promising heuristic solutions and
evaluate all the solutions on real life data.
