  GPS enables mobile devices to continuously provide new opportunities to
improve our daily lives. For example, the data collected in applications
created by Uber or Public Transport Authorities can be used to plan
transportation routes, estimate capacities, and proactively identify low
coverage areas. In this paper, we study a new kind of query-Reverse k Nearest
Neighbor Search over Trajectories (RkNNT), which can be used for route planning
and capacity estimation. Given a set of existing routes DR, a set of passenger
transitions DT, and a query route Q, a RkNNT query returns all transitions that
take Q as one of its k nearest travel routes. To solve the problem, we first
develop an index to handle dynamic trajectory updates, so that the most
up-to-date transition data are available for answering a RkNNT query. Then we
introduce a filter refinement framework for processing RkNNT queries using the
proposed indexes. Next, we show how to use RkNNT to solve the optimal route
planning problem MaxRkNNT (MinRkNNT), which is to search for the optimal route
from a start location to an end location that could attract the maximum (or
minimum) number of passengers based on a pre-defined travel distance threshold.
Experiments on real datasets demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of our
approaches. To the best of our best knowledge, this is the first work to study
the RkNNT problem for route planning.
