Abstract: An electronic map is stored as a collection of nodes and links. Roads in the map are assigned priorities for pathfinding purposes. A node's priority originally corresponds to the priority of the road associated with the node. Electronic maps can be made more useful by adding short cuts to the map. A short cut generator is disclosed that creates short cuts by building compound links and/or raising the priority of certain nodes. A compound link is a link that represents travel along multiple links of the electronic map.

Abstract: A system is disclosed for determining a path in a network that decreases the number of disk accesses needed during the pathfinding computation. The network is divided in to a set of tiles. Certain sub-paths are pre-computed. The pre-computed sub-paths are grouped into webs. When finding a path, the system will perform a pathfinding exploration within the tile for the origin and a pathfinding exploration within the tile for the destination. A number of the webs will be used with the two explorations to determine a path from the origin to the destination.