  Shortest path computation is a fundamental problem in road networks. However,
in many real-world scenarios, determining solely the shortest path is not
enough. In this paper, we study the problem of finding k-Dissimilar Paths with
Minimum Collective Length (kDPwML), which aims at computing a set of paths from
a source s to a target t such that all paths are pairwise dissimilar by at
least \theta and the sum of the path lengths is minimal. We introduce an exact
algorithm for the kDPwML problem, which iterates over all possible s-t paths
while employing two pruning techniques to reduce the prohibitively expensive
computational cost. To achieve scalability, we also define the much smaller set
of the simple single-via paths, and we adapt two algorithms for kDPwML queries
to iterate over this set. Our experimental analysis on real road networks shows
that iterating over all paths is impractical, while iterating over the set of
simple single-via paths can lead to scalable solutions with only a small
trade-off in the quality of the results.
