HiAccess: A Parallel Method for Measuring High-Resolution Spatial Accessibility in Real Time

Accessibility is an important issue in transport geography, land planning and many other related fields. Accessibility problems become computationally demanding when involving high-resolution requirements. Using conventional methods, providing high-resolution accessibility analysis for real time decision support remains a challenge. In this paper, we present a parallel method, named HiAccess, to solve the high-resolution accessibility analysis problems in real time. Pointing at accelerating accessibility analysis, we proposed an extended road network structure. Correspondingly, a fast road network construction method is proposed, in which the road network topology is determined by traversing the original road nodes only once. The parallel strategies of HiAccess are fully optimized through theoretical analysis and experimental comparisons. HiAccess demonstrates the striking performance of measuring high-resolution (using 100 $\text{m}\times 100\text{m}$ grids) accessibility of a city (in total over 250k grids, roads with 232k segments, 40 facilities) in 1 second without preprocessing, while ArcGIS takes nearly 1 hour to achieve a less satisfactory result.