An indoor spatial accessible area generation approach considering distance constraints

ABSTRACT Indoor objects’ accessible area generation considering distance constraints is of important realistic significance for spatial analysis. To the best of our knowledge, few studies have been conducted on indoor accessible area generation considering distance constraints. And because of different spatial characteristics between indoor and outdoor environment, the commonly used approach in outdoor space is not suitable for indoor space. In this paper, based on the hybrid spatial data model of geometric and symbolic model, an accessible area generation approach considering distance constraints for indoor environment is proposed by improving traditional spatial buffer zone generation technique. The buffer zone generation with a predefined distance around indoor objects within their located subspace is executed first; then, based on the indoor spatial connectivity, buffer generation around exit points is successively executed in its next connected subspaces until the distance decreases to zero. The merge of these generated buffer zones is the result of accessible area generation with a predefined distance constraint. During the process, two kinds of spatial search strategies, depth-first search and breadth-first search, are presented. Two sets of experiments are conducted to validate the correctness and efficiency of the proposed approach. Results show that the approach can be effectively used to solve the problem of indoor objects’ accessible area generation with distance constraints. Moreover, the potential use, as well as the limitation of the proposed approach is discussed in this paper