Toward An Intelligent Informative System to Determine Locations Paths in Doha City

Abstract

Tourists and new comers arriving to Doha city, the capital of Qatar, need always to know about specific locations (i.e., tourist sites, hotels, schools, universities, shopping centers, hospitals, health centres, mosques, sporting clubs, etc.) and the possible routes leading to them. They are generally using static sources (i.e., Doha maps, brochures, diverse websites, etc) to get information about theses locations or they may ask others (i.e., residents, colleagues, passer-by). Even these information seem useful, they are however imprecise and will not fully satisfy the people requests and fulfill their incremental needs. An intelligent system helping these people to find quickly a location in Doha city is needed. Such a system will give detailed information about a specific location and determine the possible paths to reach it. People are always looking to save on time and resource (i.e., gas consumption, distances, time), therefore the system will be able to find the shortest routes leading to a specific location. In addition, it will help the potential users to plan a trip and visit a set of different locations within a limited period of time. Our system proposes routes leading to the user's destination and avoid passing thru locations with high accidents rates or heavy traffic. Doha city is divided into 71 different regions which are modeled by a weighted and connected graph. Each vertex of this graph represents a specific region, which, in turn, can be a sub-graph to allow internal search within the region. Dijkestra's algorithm is used to find the shortest paths between the regions. Information's about the regions are stored in a database for possible retrieval. The weight of the edge connecting two vertices represents the distance in KM between two regions.