Ontology based personalized route planning system using a multi-criteria decision making approach

This study presents a generic ontology-based architecture using a multi-criteria decision making technique to design a personalized route planning system. The real world has become too complex to implement entirely within an information system such as geographic information system (GIS). A route planning technique is an essential geo-related decision support tool, especially in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). In ubiquitous GIS environments, personalization can be accomplished through a user’s preferences stored on mobile appliances. In this manner, personalized and user-centric route planning services using semantic technologies and ontologies perceive user and context models to satisfy user demands and predict their requirements. In the past few years, several studies have been carried out regarding personalized services. However, the existing route finding algorithms suffer from a number of major difficulties, mainly owing to insufficient criteria modeling for a personalized system. Thus, the present study investigates how a user-centric route planning system can be implemented. In order to address this research issue, an ontology-based knowledge modelling technique using an analytic hierarchical process (AHP) is proposed. This technique can facilitate determination of the choice of criteria used for applying an impedance function in the route finding algorithm. From another perspective, AHP explicitly deals with a hierarchy structure and is essentially a theory of measurement and decision making methodology used for combining or synthesizing quantitative as well as qualitative criteria. User-centric results on real data illustrate the strengths of the present approach. It is anticipated that this new technique can be applied to develop new graph algorithms based on semantic web technology and can be used with new semantic graph structures. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.