Rethinking Route Choices! On the Importance of Route Selection in Wayfinding Experiments

Abstract

Route selection for a wayfinding experiment is not a trivial task and is often made in an undocumented way. Only recently (2021), a systematic, reproducible and score-based approach for route selection for wayfinding experiments was published. However, it is still unclear how robust study results are across all potential routes in a particular experimental area. An important share of routes might lead to different conclusions than most routes. This share would distort and/or invert the study outcome. If so, the question of selecting routes that are unlikely to distort the results of our wayfinding experiments remains unanswered. In order to answer these questions, an agent-based simulation study with four different sample sizes (N = 15, 25, 50, 3000 agents) comparing Turn-by-Turn and Free Choice Navigation approaches (between-subject design) regarding their arrival rates on more than 11000 routes in the city center of Vienna, Austria, was run. The results of our study indicate that with decreasing sample size, there is an increase in the share of routes which lead to contradictory results regarding the arrival rate, i.e., the results become less robust. Therefore, based on simulation results, we present an approach for selecting suitable routes even for small-scale in-situ studies.