Urban navigation beyond shortest route: The case of safe paths. (April 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Galbrun, Esther; Pelechrinis, Konstantinos; Terzi, Evimaria
• Is Part Of: Information systems. Volume 57(2016)
• Page Start: 160
• Page End: 171
• Publication Date: 2016-04
• Subjects: Urban navigation -- Open government data -- Modeling -- Algorithms; Database management -- Periodicals; Electronic data processing -- Periodicals; Bases de données -- Gestion -- Périodiques; Informatique -- Périodiques; Database management; Electronic data processing; Periodicals; 005.7
• DOI: 10.1016/j.is.2015.10.005
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0306-4379

Abstract

Abstract: Advancements in mobile technology and computing have fostered the collection of a large number of civic datasets that capture the pulse of urban life. Furthermore, the open government and data initiative has led many local authorities to make these datasets publicly available, hoping to drive innovation that will further improve the quality of life for the city-dwellers. In this paper, we develop a novel application that utilizes crime data to provide safe urban navigation. Specifically, using crime data from Chicago and Philadelphia we develop a risk model for their street urban network, which allows us to estimate the relative probability of a crime on any road segment. Given such model we define two variants of theSafePaths problem where the goal is to find a short and low-risk path between a source and a destination location. Since both the length and the risk of the path are equally important but cannot be combined into a single objective, we approach the urban-navigation problem as a biobjective shortest path problem. Our algorithms aim to output a small set of paths that provide tradeoffs between distance and safety. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithms and their practical applicability.