A unified 3D space-based navigation model for seamless navigation in indoor and outdoor

Abstract

Seamless navigation has attracted lots of attention and many methods have been reported in the literature or made available as commercial applications. The process of navigation can be interpreted as a continuous movement of 3D objects from one unoccupied 3D indoor/outdoor space to another. From a technical perspective, a 3D navigation model is one of the critical components that should be available to perform successful navigation. A major approach to build a unified navigation model to support seamless path computation is linking indoor navigation networks to outdoor road/street-based networks. Because of different sources of indoor and outdoor navigation networks, the major approach fails to build up true seamless navigation models. With regards to this, we propose a unified 3D space-based navigation model (U3DSNM). The presented model ensures all types of spaces for navigation (indoor, semi-indoor, semi-outdoor, and outdoor) have the same representation, management methods, and network derivation approach, thereby building up unified navigation networks to support seamless navigation paths planning. The model can be linked to the international standards (data models) that are also based on spaces, such as IndoorGML and the on-going version of CityGML 3.0. Three navigation path planning cases show the feasibility of U3DSNM.