Modelling and Simulation Wayfinding in Unfamiliar Campus Environment

The "spaces" that humans use when navigating in public transport are hardly compatible with conceptions of space in current GIS. Evidence suggests that humans\´ spatial knowledge is fragmentary, schematic, hierarchically structured, and at most partially Euclidean. Previous research on human wayfinding has focused primarily on cognitive mental representations rather than modelling and simulation the searching processes of wayfinding. This paper introduces three computational models based on Depth-first search to simulates wayfinding process in unfamiliar network space environment according to different levels of heuristic information travelers can get and discusses how to use the heuristic information to assist wayfinding. A special case of wayfinding in unfamiliar campus is used to demonstrate the formal model.