Indooria-A Platform for Proactive Indoor Location-based Services

Positioning mobile terminals, persons and assets inside buildings opens several new possibilities for service providers and their users. Many different indoor positioning systems have been developed in the past, which differ e.g. in the underlying infrastructure, accuracy, energy consumption, or frequencies used. But sophisticated indoor location-based services (I-LBS) require not only knowledge about the targets’ positions but also detailed information about the topology of a building. A building topology comprises shapes of rooms together with their interconnections and other meta data like escape routes or entrance restrictions. That allows e.g. to calculate walking distances, to determine the accessibility for a certain room or to define topological zones in the building. However, bringing together indoor positioning systems and building topology information raises a couple of problems. In this paper we present an approach that combines real time position data with building topologies. Requirements and a classification for future indoor LBS are given and an approach for modeling the appropriate topologies as well as integrating position data from several positioning systems is presented. An open platform has been developed which offers interfaces for indoor LBS developers and providers e.g. to automatically detect proximity between mobile assets, or to calculate routes between locations in the building, which can be used by indoor navigation applications.