USING KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE COGNITIVE SPACE OF TRANSPORTATION NETWORKS FOR WAYFINDING

M. Weng, Q. Rong, D. Qingyun

School of resources & Environment Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

wengmin@telecarto.com

Transportation is the spatial reflection of people’s cultural activities. We need to carry out a study to find out how people recognize the transportation network space and in what way they find an optimal route that satisfies their needs perfectly.

Wayfinding has resulted in the implementation of the route planning. The route planning is the pre-activity that defines the road and turns angle to consist a route, and it encapsulates the strategies for route selection. By using the experimental psychology, the paper designs the detailed experimental study to testify people’s use of different strategies in the practical wayfinding and their preference to each criterion. Through the detailed analysis of the collected data, it comments people’s perceptions and preferences of each criterion while acquiring those different kinds of experience, knowledge, and strategies to provide the design of the algorithm of the wayfinding with guiding orientation and technique.

On the basis of analyzing the algorithm of the shortest path and the advantages and disadvantages of the problem solving based on knowledge method, it is clearly showed that neither the algorithm, which provides the precise solution nor the common method, which is totally suitable to people’s usual finding activities and based on the common sense, can provides us with a satisfactory solution. However, they can be complementary to each other, and this has made the combined use of the two become a necessity. Therefore, a wayfinding method that is based on the hierarchical reasoning and road network is proposed. In this combined method, the spatial hierarchical reasoning knowledge of the road network is applied to the separate the finding space while the conventional algorithm is used to find the best solution from this reduced and isolated space.

Basing on the theories and methods of this paper, an empirical study of the road network of Wuhan city is carried out. Combining the spatial hierarchical structure and different other knowledge, and adopting the hierarchical spatial reasoning, it first aims to solve the problem of wayfinding and compares it with the usual computing method of wayfinding. The study results presents that the solution, which is drawn out of those different kinds of wayfinding algorithms, is suitable not only to the features of the road network but also to people’s thinking mode.