A Video Game-Inspired Approach for a Pedestrian Guidance System Within a Railway Station

This paper presents a novel routing system for guiding a pedestrian within a train station, accounting for aspects such as distance, crowd density, and the pedestrian’s accessibility requirements. We achieve this by building a system that takes inspiration from the video games industry; constructing a Three-Dimensional model, annotating the model, generating a graph data structure, and performing pathfinding algorithms to establish the shortest path between two nodes. In particular, we make use of Three-Dimensional scanning technology to build a Digital Twin of Smethwick Galton Bridge station in the United Kingdom. We then use the spatial data to extract Two-Dimensional floor plans and perform Constrained Delauney Triangulation to compute a navigational mesh. The model then constructs the relevant graph data structure, on which we perform the A* Algorithm to determine the most efficient path between two coordinates within the mesh, where the efficiency is based upon both distance and the crowd density within the station.