Shortest, Fastest, -- but what Next? A Different Approach to Route Directions

Current wayfinding assistance systems calculate primarily two kinds of routes: the shortest or the fastest. To overcome this limitation, recent research extends options in route choice. All approaches, however, provide the same kind of information independent of the route at hand, i.e. all route directions are created the same way irrespective of the route's characteristics. In contrast, we will frame a model that allows for assigning route directions according to route characteristics by developing a systematics for a formal treatment and the automatic generation of route-specific route directions. In our analysis, we concentrate on decision point / action pairs; the systematics considers the structure of an environment and its elements that can be used in giving route directions. We introduce the definition of superordinate route structures and sketch the optimization process used to create route-specific route directions.