2023 International Workshop on National 3D mapping and 8th International Workshop on Dynamic and Multi-dimensional GIS

The concept of 3D indoor navigation is similar to outdoor, that is to provide the best connection between two locations. The differences are multiple. Among them the establishment of an appropriate transportation network has always been the greatest challenge. As the variety of users and indoor environments is much higher, may approaches have been studied and investigated to derive flexible, yet accurate indoor network.

We have been working on 3D indoor path computation for more than 25 years. Many approaches have been developed that consider shape/size of users, static and dynamic 3D obstacles, characteristics and tasks of users, or accurate representation of navigable areas. Several frameworks have been proposed to subdivide the 3D indoor environment in such a way to comprise the most important information for orientation and support of pathfinding applications. Unified methods for Indoor and outdoor environments have been devised to provide seamless indoor-outdoor transportation network.

Are there still challenges that need to be addressed? In the contemporary indoor environments, we observe increased complexity of building structures and possibilities to travel, extended capacity of indoor spaces, which can accommodate large amounts of people. This inevitable leads to the need of streams of data to be processed and analyses in near-real time. The future indoor path planning methods must encompass dynamic modelling, must ensure integration of sensors information, and must be able to provide realistic simulations and predictions of crowd movements or changes of interior environment due to hazard dispersion, air quality issues or accessibility considerations.  

This talk will provide an overview of methods for derivation of network for indoor path computation and will discuss future direction for research to support indoor Digital Twins and sustainable building designs.