Point Location in Dynamic Planar Subdivisions

Abstract: We study the point location problem on dynamic planar subdivisions that allows insertions and deletions of edges. In our problem, the underlying graph of a subdivision is not necessarily connected. We present a data structure of linear size for such a dynamic planar subdivision that supports sublinear-time update and polylogarithmic-time query. Precisely, the amortized update time is $O(\sqrt{n}\log n(\log\log n)<sup>{3/2})$ and the query time is $O(\log n(\log\log n)<sup>2)$, where $n$ is the number of edges in the subdivision. This answers a question posed by Snoeyink in the Handbook of Computational Geometry. When only deletions of edges are allowed, the update time and query time are just $O(\alpha(n))$ and $O(\log n)$, respectively.