PARApp Pedestrian-Aware Routing App

Abstract

Current navigation applications allow routes to be drawn between two different locations on a map, either within a town or among different cities. These applications offer routing services mainly for vehicles such as cars, motorcycles or public transport vehicles, but also for pedestrians. For vehicles, these applications increasingly take into account aspects such as fuel consumption or pollution. However, for pedestrians, most current applications only provide shortest distance routes, not considering other relevant aspects such as the profile of the users (age, physical condition, difficulties to walk-up stairs, wheelchair requirements, allergies, etc.) or the current traffic or weather conditions. In this line, this article presents PARApp, a mobile app that allows specifying the user’s profile and, based on it and on the contextual information available about the city, allows computing the fastest (shorter distance), flattest (less slope), safest (in terms of accident rate), less crowded or less polluted routes. PARApp also considers user-defined exclusion zones to be avoided when computing the former routes.