As a fundamental operation in LBS (location-based services), the trajectory similarity of moving objects has been extensively studied in recent years. However, due to the increasing volume of moving object trajectories and the demand of interactive query performance, the trajectory similarity queries are now required to be processed on massive datasets in a real-time manner. Existing work has proposed distributed or parallel solutions to enable large-scale trajectory similarity processing. However, those techniques cannot be directly adapted to the real-time scenario as it is likely to generate poor balancing performance when workload variance occurs on the incoming trajectory stream. In this paper, we propose a new workload partitioning framework, ART (Adaptive Framework for Real-Time Trajectory Similarity), which introduces practical algorithms to support dynamic workload assignment for RTTS (real-time trajectory similarity). Our proposal includes a processing model tailored for the RTTS scenario, a load balancing framework to maximize throughput, and an adaptive data partition manner designed to cut off unnecessary network cost. Based on this, our model can handle the large-scale trajectory similarity in an on-line scenario, which achieves scalability, effectiveness, and efficiency by a single shot. Empirical studies on synthetic data and real-world stream applications validate the usefulness of our proposal and prove the huge advantage of our approach over state-of-the-art solutions in the literature.

Key words: real-time data processing; distributed computing; trajectory similarity; load balancing;