In October 2015 partners of the project PERRON (Enhanced Pedestrian Routing and Navigation as well as Walkability Assessment of Pedestrian Ways) came together for the 3rd consortium meeting. AIT and partners were invited to the city of Minsk, Belarus, by the United Institute of Informatics Problems, National Academy of Sciences of Belarus.
The overall goal of the PERRON project, which is funded within ERA-NET TRANSPORT III Flagship Call 2013 “Future Travelling” is to improve pedestrian navigation by
i) defining and modeling the quality of pedestrian ways,
ii) identifying patterns for road crossing at non-dedicated crosswalks and developing routing algorithms, to be implemented and evaluated in an intermodal context, and finally
iii) by adapting and evaluating existing methods for the generation and presentation of pedestrian navigation instructions on mobile devices.
In Minsk project achievements of the first year were highlighted and actual challenges regarding the multi-criteria problem for way quality calculation as well as regarding the generation of a so-called safety-index (indicating how safe it is to cross the road at a certain location) were discussed with partners.
The PERRON project is based on a user-centred design approach, where users are substantially involved from the beginning of the project until the end. According to the relevant project phases, on-going user-involvement activities are mainly concentrated on user requirements and evaluation activities. The objectives of the first project period were to understand the end users of the project, the situations and contexts in which they are interacting with mobile navigation tools, strategies for safe road crossing behaviour, as well as user, stakeholder and technological requirements. The detailed design of the PERRON user interfaces with implementation will be realized with beginning of the second year.