Abstract:
Globally, women are cautious when planning their
routine travel routes. In a recent survey on street harassment,
82% of international respondents reported taking a different
route to their destination than the conventional route due to
fear of harassment. Such studies indicate an increasing need
for ‘Safe Routing’, especially in developing nations where the
lack of infrastructure such as street lights, may contribute to
higher crime rates. However, to the best of our knowledge,
no state-of-the-art navigation system provides the option of
‘Safe Routing’. In this work, we propose a novel system that
recommends “Safe Routes”. Routes recommended by our system
balance the conflicting requirements of increasing the safety
and constraining the total length of the path to be within a
reasonable limit (as desired by the user). From a theoretical
perspective, the problem of ‘Safe Routing’ can be modeled as
the Arc Orienteering Problem, which is a well-known NP-hard
combinatorial optimization problem.
