Angle Difference Method for Vehicle Navigation in Multilevel Road Networks With a Three-Dimensional Transport GIS Database

Multilevel road networks such as grade-separated interchanges and elevated roads have been increasingly used to solve traffic congestion in large cities. When navigating a vehicle in a multilevel road network, identifying the location of the vehicle in different road levels is of equal importance to identifying its planar location, particularly for overlapping and parallel roads. Although they can be represented and visualized in the existing navigation system, at present, it is difficult to guide a vehicle through such a multilevel road network because the existing vehicle positioning system uses consumer-grade GPS, and the transport geographic information system (GIS-T) database is mainly 2-D-based. The location of a vehicle on diffrent road levels in multilevel road networks is often overlooked. This paper examines the deficiency of existing approaches in supporting vehicle navigation in multilevel road networks with consumer-grade GPS. It proposes to use an angle difference method that compares the vehicle pitch angle with the inclination angles of different road levels calculated from road elevations stored in the proposed GIS-T database to snap the vehicle to the appropriate road level when the vehicle is entering or exiting a multilevel road network. The angle difference method is implemented based on consumer-grade assisted GPS (A-GPS) and onboard vehicle pitch angle measurement with smartphone. Experiment results prove that the angle difference method have high accuracy in determining the road level when the vehicle is driving in a parallel multilevel road network.