In applied mathematics, the method of contraction hierarchies is a technique to simplify shortest-path routing by first creating precomputed "contracted" versions of the connection graph. It can be regarded as a special case of highway-node routing.

Contraction hierarchies can be used to generate shortest-path routes much more efficiently than Dijkstra's algorithm

Dijkstra's algorithm

Dijkstra's algorithm, conceived by Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra in 1956 and published in 1959, is a graph search algorithm that solves the single-source shortest path problem for a graph with nonnegative edge path costs, producing a shortest path tree...

 or previous highway-node routing approaches, and are used in the OpenTripPlanner software.