Research And Practice Of The Context-aware Indoor Routing

As the urbanization continues to accelerate, the internal structures of large buildings become more and more complex, resulting in a very complicated overall structure so that even familiar persons are likely to get lost when searching for a particular room or place. This paper mainly center on indoor routing for people in different scenarios. The main contents are as follows.(1) Compared to the outdoor space, the characteristics of indoor space were analyzed and summarized so as to expound the necessity of indoor spatial modeling. Combined with the features of context-aware indoor routing, the paper discussed the spatial modeling for indoor navigation from the aspects of geometry, topology and semantic, which in turn help to confirm the emphasis of spatial modeling in this paper. Based on the analysis and comparison on the typical indoor spatial semantic structures, the indoor semantic structure description was proposed for the context-aware indoor navigation, which lay the foundation for the navigational model building.(2) According to the characteristics of context-aware application and indoor space, five requirements were proposed for the navigational spatial modeling. Based on the requirements, a detailed analysis was given to the “room-room” model and “door-door” model, then the combined method of both were confirmed to be applied to build the graph-based navigation model. The conceptual navigation model was built on the basis of the combined method, and the corresponding data structures were designed. The paper also gave an elaborate discussion of the indoor network modeling methods which were based on the navigation model, and put forward corresponding solutions for the special cases during the network modeling.(3) The main contextual influence factors during the indoor routing were analyzed so as to define the modeling contents of the indoor routing context. The major ways of the description of the two basic contexts: time and location were discussed in detail, and data structures corresponding to the user, congestion and event as three types of contexts were given. This paper discussed systematically the implementation process of the context-aware indoor routing,and probed into some key issues deeply. The conversion methods which involved POI and user location with the route network were proposed, and the realization of algorithms that were associated with the two stages of “determining the available route network” and “weight updating” during path planning were also presented.(4) A prototype system for the context-aware indoor routing was designed and developed successfully. Based on the prototype system, several indoor routing experiments were designed for different scenarios, the results of which validated the effectiveness and efficiency of the methods and models proposed.