• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.24 no.10
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• pp.79-89
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• 2019

While most research focuses on the k-nearest neighbors (kNN) queries in the database community, an important type of proximity queries called k-farthest neighbors (kFN) queries has not received much attention. This paper addresses the problem of finding the k-farthest neighbors in road networks. Given a positive integer k, a query object q, and a set of data points P, a kFN query returns k data objects farthest from the query object q. Little attention has been paid to processing kFN queries in road networks. The challenge of processing kFN queries in road networks is reducing the number of network distance computations, which is the most prominent difference between a road network and a Euclidean space. In this study, we propose an efficient algorithm called FANS for k-FArthest Neighbor Search in road networks. We present a shared computation strategy to avoid redundant computation of the distances between a query object and data objects. We also present effective pruning techniques based on the maximum distance from a query object to data segments. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of our proposed solution with extensive experiments using real-world roadmaps.