Pedestrian routing of dynamic areas using Volunteered Geographical Information (OpenStreetMap)

Abstract

Pedestrians, contrasting with vehicles, do not take routes only over defined linear features. Routing networks have historically ignored that pedestrians have a higher degree of freedom, and can naturally move through open spaces. On top of that, our real world is not static, it changes dynamically. Routing apps also fail in most cases to portray the varying character of the reality on the ground.Combining both time dependent, and open areas I can define a complex scenario called Time Dependent Open Areas (TDOAs).The “ecosystem” of OSM applications provides a starting point for my solution, and paves the way for the development of derived work on an already established base.I propose a standard way (schema) of mapping TDOAs, deriving from the current OSM time dependent and pedestrian open areas schemas.After that, I combine time dependent and open area routing algorithms to create a single unified routing service for TDOAs. The unified routing service uses OSM data and the new schema to generate the routing graph.TDOAs are demonstrated to be representable in OSM. My suggested proposal is able to adapt to many different realities before not mapped or considered, while still preserving OSM philosophy.Routing is also proved to be possible, albeit the current approach is not perfect. Work should and must be redefined in future iterations, to fix the adjacent areas border problem.Several use cases and future work is proposed. This thesis should just be considered as the stepping stone in a much broader topic, yet to be developed.