Indoor Traveling Salesman Problem (ITSP) Path Planning

With the growing complexity of indoor living environments, people have an increasing demand for indoor navigation. Currently, navigation path options in indoor are monotonous as existing navigation systems commonly offer single-source shortest-distance or fastest paths. Such path options might be not always attractive. For instance, pedestrians in a shopping mall may be interested in a path that navigates through multiple places starting from and ending at the same location. Here, we name it as the indoor traveling salesman problem (ITSP) path. As its name implies, this path type is similar to the classical outdoor traveling salesman problem (TSP), namely, the shortest path that visits a number of places exactly once and returns to the original departure place. This paper presents a general solution to the ITSP path based on Dijkstra and branch and bound (B&B) algorithm. We demonstrate and validate the method by applying it to path planning in a large shopping mall with six floors, in which the QR (Quick Response) codes are assumed to be utilized as the indoor positioning approach. The results show that the presented solution can successfully compute the ITSP paths and their potentials to apply to other indoor navigation applications at museums or hospitals.