Collaborative personalized multi‐criteria wayfinding for wheelchair users in outdoors
Published online on September 26, 2016
Abstract
While finding the optimal route for users with physical disabilities and personalizing routes for each user, on the one hand, and collaborative wayfinding, on the other hand, have been addressed in the pedestrian navigation systems literature, there has not been much research on combining the two activities. The problem associated with wayfinding approaches solely based on information about network segments and personal preferences is that the information about segments in the database may not, correctly and/or adequately address user preferences. The problem associated with wayfinding approaches solely based on the ratings given to routes by wheelchair users is the lack of rates (or scores) for all possible routes between all possible origin‐destination pairs in the network. This article discusses an approach to combine these two approaches for wayfinding to augment each other's shortcomings. To evaluate the personalized wayfinding approach, we utilize a route index, called a comparison index. The results show that with a P‐value of 9%, the routes obtained from our approach are more accessible than the routes obtained from another approach developed in another study. To evaluate the collaborative wayfinding approach, a Monte Carlo simulation was conducted which reflects the updates in routes as users' feedbacks become available.