Abstract: Nowadays, the traffic congestion is becoming more and more serious. It is urgent to find a path planning algorithm with high efficiency. As a heuristic algorithm, A* algorithm can solve the
problem of path planning with high efficiency, and the design of heuristic function is particularly
important. By analyzing the problems of route planning, some improvements have been made in this paper: firstly, the evaluation function with two elements of distance and direction are considered; through the process of normalization, the problem of unified unit has been solved; secondly, use the smallest heap spatial to load the node information dynamically, and reduce the memory usage space.
Keywords: Heuristic algorithm, A* algorithm, cost function, smallest heap