A Mobile Computing Framework for Navigation Tasks

Mobile agents and movement systems have been rapidly increased worldwide. Within the last few years, we were facing many advances in wireless communication, computer networks, location-based engines, and on-board positioning sensors. Mobile GIS as an integrating system of mobile user, wireless network, and some GIS capabilities has fostered a great interest in the GIS field [14]. Without any doubt navigation and routing could be one of the most popular GIS based solution on mobile terminals. Due to this fact the mobile GIS is defined as an area about non-geographic moving object in geographic space [22]. Although the mobile computing has been increasingly growing in the past decade, there still exist some important constraints which complicate the use of mobile GIS systems. The limited resources on the mobile computing would restrict some features that are available on the traditional computing. The resources include computational resources (e.g., processor speed and memory) user interfaces (e.g., display and pointing device), bandwidth of mobile connectivity, and energy source [3], [11], [22], and [38]. In addition, one important characteristic of such environment is frequent disconnection that is ranging from a complete to weak disconnection [11] and [44]. The traditional GIS computation methods and algorithms are not well suited for such environment. These special characteristics of mobile GIS environment make us pay more attention to this topic. In this chapter, in order to provide a paradigm that treats with mobile objects; i.e. an automatic machine that is capable of movement in a mobile information environment; a logical framework is presented. In this framework the concept of spatial influenceability is combined with well-known formal structure; i.e. network structure. In our view, influenceability which stands for both space and time domains is a primary relation. It has some exclusive properties in the mobile information context. It can be served as a basis for context-aware mobile computing because it depends on abilities of single player or agent. Within the framework of this chapter we attempt to apply an idea to treat moving objects in mobile GIS environment based on partitioning in space and time. The idea is, to divide space-time into small parts and find solution (e.g. collision-free paths and wayfinding procedures) recursively. In this paper, finding a path without any conflict which is so-called