Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica ›› 2026, Vol. 55 ›› Issue (2): 191-205.doi: 10.11947/j.AGCS.2026.20250480

• Spatial Artificial Intelligence and Smart Cities •    

Pedestrian path planning driven by preference-enhanced adversarial deep reinforcement learning

Yunbo RAN1(), Xue YANG1(), Wenhao ZHOU1, Chengen WU2, Baoding ZHOU3, Luliang TANG4, Qingquan LI5   

  1. 1.School of Geography and Information Engineering, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, China
    2.Patent Examination Cooperation Guangdong Center of the Patent Office, Guangzhou 510535, China
    3.Guangdong Key Laboratory of Urban Informatics, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China
    4.State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China
    5.Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Spatial Smart Sensing and Services, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China
  • Received:2025-11-13 Revised:2026-01-05 Published:2026-03-13
  • Contact: Xue YANG E-mail:ranyb@cug.edu.cn;yangxue@cug.edu.cn
  • About author:RAN Yunbo (2002—), male, postgraduate, majors in pedestrian path planning. E-mail: ranyb@cug.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    The National Natural Science Foundation of China(42271449)

Abstract:

With the advancement of smart city development and precise navigation technologies, pedestrian path planning research has gradually shifted from a single efficiency-oriented paradigm to one driven by multidimensional and personalized demands. The primary objective is to develop path planning models that account for complex urban environments and individual user preferences, thereby providing efficient, flexible, and personalized route recommendations for pedestrians. However, current research still faces key challenges, including insufficient modeling of group heterogeneity, the absence of dynamic preference mechanisms, and limited adaptability to complex scenarios. To address these issues, This paper proposes a pedestrian path planning method based on multi-dimensional preference modeling and adversarial deep reinforcement learning. The proposed method first constructs a “context-aware and dynamically adaptive” multidimensional preference model, which provides dynamic preference weights for pedestrian route selection. These weights guide the reshaping of the reward function in the deep reinforcement learning framework, enabling a multi-objective collaborative optimization mechanism that balances efficiency, safety, and comfort. Subsequently, a preference-enhanced adversarial deep Q-network algorithm (PEA-DQN) is developed, incorporating a dual-experience replay pretraining strategy and an adaptive training mechanism to accelerate model convergence and reduce redundant computation. Experiments conducted in Wuhan under dynamic disturbances within a mixed urban road network validate the performance of the model trained by PEA-DQN. Compared with the DQN algorithm, PEA-DQN improves obstacle-avoidance success rates by more than 50% and reduces average path length by 40.40%. Ablation studies further demonstrate that, relative to Dueling DQN, the incorporation of a multi-objective reward function improves path quality by 100.4%, while the adaptive mechanism increases computational efficiency by 40% in dynamic obstacle scenarios. Overall, PEA-DQN significantly outperforms dynamic A* algorithm and other comparable deep reinforcement learning approaches.

Key words: pedestrian path planning, deep reinforcement learning, multi-dimensional preference modeling, personalized mobility

CLC Number: