Indoor Positioning Technology Assessment using Analytic Hierarchy Process for Pedestrian Navigation Services

Indoor positioning is one of the biggest challenges of many location-based applications and services. Providing users with accurate, reliable, cheap or free-to-use, low power consuming to calculate and continuously available positional data becomes even more challenging when pedestrians are the target users. People spend most of their time in roofed areas, such as houses, offices, airports, shopping centres and in general indoors. There are some positioning technologies that can be applied as stand-alone indoor positioning technologies. They include WLAN, BLE, UWB, RFID passive and active, tactile floor and high sensitivity GNSS. This paper evaluate the practicality and fitness-to-the-purpose of pedestrian navigation of each of these stand-alone positioning technology to identify the best one for the purpose of indoor pedestrian navigation. In this regard, the most important criteria defining a suitable positioning service for pedestrian navigation are identified and prioritised. They include accuracy, availability, cost, power consumption and privacy. Then, each technology is evaluated according to each criterion using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and finally the combination of all weighted criteria and technologies are being processed to identify the most suitable solution.