3D NETWORK ANALYSIS FOR INDOOR SPACE APPLICATIONS

Indoor space differs from outdoor environments, since it is characterized by a higher level of structural complexity, geometry, as well as topological relations. Indoor space can be considered as the most important component in a building’s conceptual modelling, on which applications such as indoor navigation, routing or analysis are performed. Therefore, the conceptual meaning of sub spaces or the activities taking place in physical building boundaries (e.g. walls), require the comprehension of the building’s indoor hierarchical structure. The scope of this paper is to perform 3D network analysis in a building’s interior and is structured as follows: In Section 1 the definition of indoor space is provided and indoor navigation requirements are analysed. Section 2 describes the processes of indoor space modeling, as well as routing applications. In Section 3, a case study is examined involving a 3D building model generated in CityEngine (exterior shell) and ArcScene (interior parts), in which the use of commercially available software tools (ArcGIS, ESRI), in terms of indoor routing and 3D network analysis, are explored. The fundamentals of performing 3D analysis with the ArcGIS Network Analyst extension were tested. Finally a geoprocessing model was presented, which was specifically designed to be used to interactively find the best route in ArcScene. The paper ends with discussion and concluding remarks on Section 4.