A Pattern‐Based Approach for Matching Nodes in Heterogeneous Urban Road Networks

This article presents an approach to hierarchical matching of nodes in heterogeneous road networks in the same urban area. Heterogeneous road networks not only exist at different levels of detail (LoD), but also have different coordinate systems, leading to difficulties in matching and integrating them. To overcome these difficulties, a pattern‐based method was implemented. Based on the authors' previous work on detecting patterns of divided highways, complex road junctions, and strokes to eliminate the LoD effect of road networks, the proposed method extracts the local networks around each node in a road network and uses them as the matching units for the nodes. Second, the degree of shape similarity between the matching units is measured using a Minimum Road Edit Distance based on a transformation. Finally, the proposed method hierarchically matches the nodes in a road network using the Minimum Road Edit Distance and eliminates false matching nodes using M‐estimators. An experiment involving matching heterogeneous road networks with different LoDs and coordinate systems was carried out to verify the validity of the proposed method. The method achieves good and effective matching regardless of differences in LoDs and road‐network coordinate systems.