A Universal Abstract Model for Future Movements of Moving Objects

Abstract

Recently, with the advances in mobile technology and emerging mobile applications, moving objects databases have become the focus of much research. A number of models have been proposed to handle the continuously changing geometries and positions of moving objects. While most of these models focus on managing the historical and current motion of moving objects, only a few of them have been proposed to deal with their future movements. Due to the complexity of handling the uncertainty aspect associated with future movements, these models are often restricted to a specific type of constrained movement and tailored to a certain application domain by integrating specific prediction techniques. These predictions are often based only on the past and current movements and neglect external domain-specific information which may significantly affect the future movements of moving objects. In this paper, we emphasize the separation of moving object models and prediction methods and propose a universal abstract model for future movements of moving objects. This abstract model serves as a conceptual basis for all future movement models as well as poses object requirements for the output of all prediction methods.