BeaconNav

CS310 Team 1 Spring 2025 Final Project

🌐 Finds optimal pedestrian routes on a geographic graph using pathfinding algorithms

🔗 Table of Contents

Click to expand

• About

• Installation

• Usage

• Example

• Sample points

• Results

About

BeaconNav is a geographic pathfinding tool that computes the shortest pedestrian route between two user-selected points within a bounded region of the UMass Boston area.

The pedestrian network is retrieved from OpenStreetMap using the 'overpy' API. We define the campus area using a polygonal boundary:

UMB_REGION = [
  (42.3198, -71.0525),
  (42.3202, -71.0519),
  ...
]

Note

The bounded region includes the UMass Boston campus and extends toward the JFK/UMass station area.

This region defines the search space used by the pathfinding algorithms:

• Dijkstra's algorithm
• A* Search

💻 Installation

Install dependencies:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

To run the project, use the following command:

python3 src/main.py

🎯 Example

$ python3 src/main.py
please enter your starting location: university hall
please enter your ending location: mccormack hall
please choose an algorithm ('dijkstra', 'astar'): astar

Computing shortest path using A* algorithm...

Expanded nodes: 36
0.0036 seconds
Estimated walk time: 3.5 minutes
Walking distance: 0.18 miles

Important

To generate and view the plotted path map, the 'cartopy' library (listed in 'requirements.txt') must be installed.

🧭 Sample Points

Click to expand

• university hall
• campus center
• wheatley hall
• mccormack hall
• integreated sciences complex
• healey
• east residence hall
• west residence hall
• harbor point
• commonwealth museum
• john f kennedy presidential library
• jfk/umass
• bayside parking lot
• west garage

📊 Results

Both A* and Dijkstra's algorithms compute the shortest paths. However, A* significantly reduces work by expanding far fewer nodes.