Abstract:

Motivated by our will to encourage students, faculty members, administrative personnel and visitors to prefer walking within our campus instead of using cars or motorbikes, we present SWaP, a “Shortest Walking-Paths” campus assistant. SwaP is a progressive web application (PWA) enabling users to obtain shortest walking paths between any points of interest within our university campus. Points of interest include academic departments, administrative services and other facilities located within our campus like libraries, restaurants,, coffee-shops and bus-stops.

Walking within a campus instead of using vehicles has multiple benefits for the community members. At an individual level, walking improves physical and mental health, helps in maintaining contact with nature, relieves stress and requires no budget. At a group level, walking is an environment-friendly activity which can enable socializing within the community, facilitate verbal face-to-face communication among community members, offer opportunities for meeting new people and obtaining new social and cultural experiences. Furthermore, walking within a university campus can let community members discover facilities and services which could not be easily located when driving, and also offer opportunities for artistic and sociological activities like for example photography or exploration and close inspection of exhibits, religious points, sculptures or other creations.

By using SWaP community members or visitors of the campus can easily select start and end points on an interactive map and receive a shortest walking-path connecting these points graphically depicted on the map together with additional useful details including total distance and walking directions. Currently, SWaP includes all existing points of interest within the campus. However, existing points of interest can be updated and new points of interest can be embedded. SWaP is currently offered in English and Greek. It is a lightweight, easy-to-use, responsive application. Moreover, as a progressive web application, SWaP can be used as a web site and mobile app on any device. Users can add the application to their home screen. Then, when launched from the home screen, SWaP becomes top-level, full-screen, and works offline. For building SWaP, we exploited OpenStreetMap and a routing API using Dijkstra and A* routing algorithms and its bidirectional variants as well as JavaScript, Leaflet, Materialize, sweetalert2, html and css.

SWaP can be easily adapted to any particular university campus and, thus, become a valuable e-assistant for encouraging community members to engage in walking and benefit from this extremely useful activity.

Keywords:

Progressive web app, shortest walking paths, university campus, JavaScript, leaflet, Dijkstra and A* routing algorithms.