In recent years, with the widespread use of location-aware handheld devices and the development of wireless networks, trajectory data have shown a trend of rapid growth in data volume and coverage, which has led to the prosperous development of location-based services (LBS). Spatio-temporal range query, as the basis of many services, remains a challenge in supporting efficient analysis and calculation of data, especially when large volumes of trajectory data have been accumulated. We propose a Hilbert-GeoSOT spatio-temporal meshing and coding method called HGST to improve the efficiency of spatio-temporal range queries on massive trajectory data. First, the method uses Hilbert to encode the grids obtained based on the GeoSOT space division model, and then constructs a unified time division standard to generate the space–time location identification of trajectory data. Second, this paper builds a novel spatio-temporal index to organize trajectory data, and designs an adaptive spatio-temporal scaling and coding method based on HGST to improve the query performance on indexed records. Finally, we implement a prototype system based on HBase and Spark, and develop a Spark-based algorithm to accelerate the spatio-temporal range query for huge trajectory data. Extensive experiments on a real taxi trajectory dataset demonstrate that HGST improves query efficiency levels by approximately 14.77% and 34.93% compared with GeoSOT-ST and GeoMesa at various spatial scales, respectively, and has better scalability under different data volumes.

Urban grid prediction can be applied to many classic spatial-temporal prediction tasks such as air quality prediction, crowd density prediction, and traffic flow prediction, which is of great importance to smart city building. In light of its practical values, many methods have been developed for it and have achieved promising results. Despite their successes, two main challenges remain open: (a) how to well capture the global dependencies and (b) how to effectively model the multi-scale spatial-temporal correlations? To address these two challenges, we propose a novel method— DeepMeshCity , with a carefully-designed Self-Attention Citywide Grid Learner ( SA-CGL ) block comprising of a self-attention unit and a Citywide Grid Learner ( CGL ) unit. The self-attention block aims to capture the global spatial dependencies, and the CGL unit is responsible for learning the spatial-temporal correlations. In particular, a multi-scale memory unit is proposed to traverse all stacked SA-CGL blocks along a zigzag path to capture the multi-scale spatial-temporal correlations. In addition, we propose to initialize the single-scale memory units and the multi-scale memory units by using the corresponding ones in the previous fragment stack, so as to speed up the model training. We evaluate the performance of our proposed model by comparing with several state-of-the-art methods on four real-world datasets for two urban grid prediction applications. The experimental results verify the superiority of DeepMeshCity over the existing ones. The code is available at https://github.com/ILoveStudying/DeepMeshCity.