A navigation system for safe routing

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.