Methods and data structures for efficient cross-referencing of physical-asset spatial identifiers

A non-transitory computer readable storage medium storing one or more programs, the one or more programs comprising instructions, which are executed by one or more processors to:

• provide first and second data sets comprising records, each record comprising an n-dimensional asset identifier that encodes a center-of-mass position and center-of-mass-to-bounding-polytope extents along n dimensions (n≥2) of a physical asset in a single, non-opaque, computer-readable code string;
• construct first and second trie data structures based on the first and second data sets, respectively, wherein each layer of the trie data structure corresponds with a successive degree of spatial resolution and each leaf node in a layer comprises a subset of n-dimensional asset identifiers co-located in an n-dimensional grid cell;
• zip the first and second trie data structures at a predetermined level of spatial resolution to yield a coproduct of the subsets from a pair of first and second trie-data-structure leaf nodes, the coproduct comprising a list of candidate cross-referenced pairs of records from the first and second data sets;
• calculate a spatially-based statistic associated with a predetermined heuristic for the n-dimensional asset identifiers in a pair of nodes;
• and
• apply the predetermined heuristic to select a cross-referenced pair of records from the list of candidate cross-referenced pairs, wherein the instructions, which are executed to calculate the spatially-based statistic, further comprise instructions, which are executed to:
• decode an n-dimensional asset identifier to yield its center of mass and its center-of-mass-to-bounding-polytope extents;
• label respective asset identifiers in a candidate cross-referenced pair as having either the least or greatest area;
• and
• calculate the Euclidean distance between centers of mass for the candidate cross-referenced pair;
• wherein the predetermined heuristic comprises the pair of n-dimensional asset identifiers for which a percentage area of intersection for bounding boxes with the least area is greatest and for which a distance between two centers of mass is lowest.