Safety-aware routing for motorised tourists based on open data and VGI

Abstract

In this work, we present a routing approach avoiding relatively dangerous areas within a city. The information of how dangerous some urban areas are is derived using volunteered geographic information (VGI), governmental open data for detecting properties and functionalities of the urban infrastructure and historical crime data from police departments for detecting crime hot spots. Therefore, we present the basics of crime mapping and analysis with GIS, the practical use of VGI for routing and describe our contribution within the field of routing solutions. Afterwards, we explore our test data in detail. For the practical use, we simplify all the urban infrastructure information and propose a safety index, which represents the relative safety in the investigation area. Additionally, historical crime hot spots are detected and used as routing obstacles. The arcs in the road network are weighted by our safety index and the historical crime hot spots are introduced as obstacle polygons. We test our safety-aware routing design on Los Angeles (LA) and assume its use during night times. In this regard, from two relatively far away situated origin and destination points, we calculate the least dangerous path and compare it with the calculated shortest path. Vehicle drivers without knowledge about the dangerous areas in the city may use the least dangerous path, which is based on our calculated safety index. Finally, we discuss the effectiveness of our method and consider further extensions using freely available geodata.