Walkway Network Building for Multi-modal Route Planning

Most of public travel information services nowadays are limited to the driving navigation or bus/subway guidance. Practical needs for pedestrian navigation yet haven’t got met enough and usually result in unacceptable travel route planning. This paper presents an approach on building Walkway network with different map layers for pedestrian specified facilities, and then implements pedestrian aimed route planning considering complete walking guidance. With the road network dataset and the walking concerned facilities dataset (e.g. overpass, underpass, pedestrian crosswalk in separate map layers), this research established a walkway network automatically through neighbourhood searching, topological and geometrical computation, as well as attribute considering. The walkway network is argued suitable for foot walking and critical for the walking guidance during mode transfer in multi-modal journeys, and also the fundamental difference with traditional approaches and current map websites and mobile navigation systems. A prototype system was developed to verify above approach. Data utilized in this prototype comprise detailed road network navigation dataset, and overpass, underpass and pedestrian crosswalk dataset in Beijing downtown. * Corresponding author