Interactive in-vehicle guidance through a multihierarchical representation of urban maps

Small computers used for assisting drivers (mostly in finding routes) have been growing in popularity in the last years. These systems are inherently interactive, but up to date this interaction is tackled under rather simple approaches. For example, current routing computered-assistants only consider the shortest or the quickest route to a destination, although in certain situations it could be interesting for the driver to take into consideration other factors, such as the criminal rate, land value, or the beauty of the areas to be traversed. On the other hand, the interactive processes between the driver and the routing assistant are still very limited: they only enable the user to discard (or suggest) particular locations through a fixed set of names, i.e. street’s names. This paper proposes a novel interactive mechanism for in-vehicle routing that uses topological information at different levels of detail and a multi-hierarchical representation of urban maps. These hierarchical representations permit the system not only to plan routes efficiently, but also to report them at different levels of detail in a human-like set of symbols adapted to each user. This enhances the human-computer interaction during the routing process, increasing driver satisfaction. We illustrate our technique through a case of study in the city of Málaga (Spain).