Problem

People have trouble navigating indoors and out. Of course the problem outdoor is to some degree solved with GPS but indoors only some buildings are mapped. More are doing it. However research has discoved that compared to outdoor navigation, people tend to lose orientation more easily inside buildings and current indoor navigation systems only provide users with shortest or fastest routes. Yet, humans rarely move around using only these criteria. (see paper below)

A project here could explore methods to provide routes with other characteristics (e.g., simplicity, fewest-turns and floor-first, and main-corridor-first), based on existing indoor data models (e.g., IndoorGML). The Magee Campus could be used as a test area. This project could computationally formulate route choice criteria, and develop route-planning algorithms to provide routes other than the shortest route.

It would build on this core paper: Golledge, R. G. (1995). Path selection and route preference in human navigation: A progress report. In A. Frank & W. Kuhn (Eds.), Spatial Information Theory A Theoretical Basis for GIS (Vol. 988, pp. 207-222). Heidelberg: Springer