Pedestrian intelligent transportation systems (ITS) is remarked for one of the post ITS which provides pedestrians and wheelchair users with convenient navigation. Pedestrians move more slowly than cars. If a pedestrian goes the wrong way, he must retrace his steps, which requires the expenditure of energy and time. So in comparison to car navigation, pedestrian navigation must be more detailed, with greater consideration given to the route complexity and the user's psychological characteristics. By means of questionnaires, the authors examined which factors affect users' demands for navigation. The responses to questionnaires from 96 subjects show that the following three factors contribute most to users' demands: the route non-linearity, the junction complexity and the change of road width. The degree of the navigation demand is represented as a linear combination of these three factors. This paper describes a navigation demand model which can automatically calculate the degree of the navigation demand. Three factors are automatically extracted from map information. The automatic generation of a navigation system based on this model runs on a PC. This technology will be applied to the actual service "Ekimae-Tanken Club" (<http://ekitan.com>) soon.
Abstract