Intermodal Door-to-Door Routing for People with Physical Impairments in a Web-Based,Open-Source Platform

Abstract

The needs of people with disabilities are addressed by the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, whose intent is that people with disabilities participate equally in societal activities as people without disabilities. The research reported here followed the aim of the UN convention through the development of a geospatial barrier catalog and the implementation of a prototype of a web-based, intermodal door-to-door routing application for people with physical impairments. Within the geospatial barrier catalog, objects and structures, built-in indoor or outdoor environments, are outlined as to their influence on the intermodal locomotion of people with physical, visual, and hearing impairments. The spatial representation of the catalog is presented in a data model within the OpenStreetMap framework. On the basis of the data model, indoor and outdoor data were collected for the inner city of Villach, Austria, as a study area. The prototype used a customized version of the open-source, intermodal trip planner Open-TripPlanner, which supported trip planning for walking in combination with public transportation, including transition-free routing between indoor and outdoor environments. The functionality of the trip planner was illustrated for two scenarios.