Session:

Standard Components and Activities in the Engineering of Intelligent Systems
Monday March 01, 2004, 17.35 – 17.55

Session Chair:

Tatjana Welzer

Paper Title:

An Adaptive Method for Map Reconstruction

Author(s):

I.K. Altinel, Bogazici University, Turkiye
N.Aras, Bogazici University, Turkiye
B.J. Oommen, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Abstract:

We consider the fundamental problem of reconstructing a map when the given data is the set of road travel distances among cities in a region. This problem is the "inverse" of the distance estimation problem, in which the goal is to determine a good estimator for inter-city road travel distances. More specifically, given the road distances among cities in a geographical area, we attempt to determine the locations of the cities in a two dimensional map so that the Euclidean inter-city distances approximate the actual road distances as closely as possible. The reported solutions to this problem are few, and primarily involve multi-dimensional scaling techniques. We propose an adaptive method to overcome their distinct disadvantages. The new method has been rigorously tested on different data sets obtained from various countries. Our results have also been compared with the performance of the classical multi-dimensional scaling and ALSCAL. The accuracy of the proposed method is superior. It has also two additional desirable properties. First, we can obtain point configurations even if some of the input data are missing. Second, it becomes possible to determine configurations where points representing cities are located close to the original ones.