HIERARCHICAL STREET NETWORKS AS A CONCEPTUAL MODEL FOR EFFICIENT WAY FINDING

The existing models of street networks and mathematical algorithms for way finding used in Vehicle Navigation Systems do not always provide satisfactory results. One of the reasons is the large amount of data not properly structured for real time processing. This paper concentrates on conceptual modeling of the human reasoning process of way finding in a hierarchically structured street network. The fastest (not the shortest) path is found by just considering the highest appropriate level of the network. The formalization process determines properties of street network elements in different hierarchical levels in order to find the fastest path. This conceptualization enables the determination of the relations between speed in different levels of the hierarchy and the size of the meshes per hierarchy level. We expect the use of hierarchical street networks as a conceptual model for way finding in Vehicle Navigation Systems to provide results faster than now and therefore allow processing of much larger networks.