Tourist trip planning functionalities : state-of-the-art and future

When tourists visit a city or region, they cannot visit every point of interest available, as they are constrained in time and budget. Tourist recommender applications help tourists by presenting a personal selection. Providing adequate tour scheduling support for these kinds of applications is a daunting task for the application developer. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how existing models from the field of Operations Research (OR) fit this scheduling problem, and enable a wide range of tourist trip planning functionalities. Using the Orienteering Problem (OP) and its extensions to model the tourist trip planning problem, allows to deal with a vast number of practical planning problems

Experiences with RFID-Based Interactive Learning in Museums

Tourism plays an important role in the economies of many countries. Tourism can secure employment, foreign exchange earnings, investment and regional development. To attract more tourists and local visitors, many stakeholders such as natural parks, museums, art galleries, hotels and restaurants provide personalised services to meet individual needs. With the increasing number of tourists comes an increased demand for guides at education-oriented leisure centers. Each provided needs unique way to present their services. In this study, these educational leisure centres are coarsely divided into art and science. This paper introduces the architecture of the proposed guide system including a PDA-based recommendation guide for art museums and an Radiofrequency identification-based interactive learning system using collaborative filtering technology for science and engineering education. Evaluations of the two systems reveal that the system inspires and nurtures visitors’ interest in science and arts

An Intelligent Customization Framework for Tourist Trip Design Problems

In the era of the experience economy, “customized tours” and “self-guided tours” have become mainstream. This paper proposes an end-to-end framework for solving the tourist trip design problems (TTDP) using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and data analysis. The proposed approach considers heterogeneous tourist preferences, customized requirements, and stochastic traffic times in real applications. With various heuristics methods, our approach is scalable without retraining for every new problem instance, which can automatically adapt the solution when the problem constraint changes slightly. We aim to provide websites or users with software tools that make it easier to solve TTDP, promoting the development of smart tourism and customized tourism

Network layer access control for context-aware IPv6 applications

As part of the Lancaster GUIDE II project, we have developed a novel wireless access point protocol designed to support the development of next generation mobile context-aware applications in our local environs. Once deployed, this architecture will allow ordinary citizens secure, accountable and convenient access to a set of tailored applications including location, multimedia and context based services, and the public Internet. Our architecture utilises packet marking and network level packet filtering techniques within a modified Mobile IPv6 protocol stack to perform access control over a range of wireless network technologies. In this paper, we describe the rationale for, and components of, our architecture and contrast our approach with other state-of-the- art systems. The paper also contains details of our current implementation work, including preliminary performance measurements

Progress in information technology and tourism management: 20 years on and 10 years after the Internet—The state of eTourism research

This paper reviews the published articles on eTourism in the past 20 years. Using a wide variety of sources, mainly in the tourism literature, this paper comprehensively reviews and analyzes prior studies in the context of Internet applications to Tourism. The paper also projects future developments in eTourism and demonstrates critical changes that will influence the tourism industry structure. A major contribution of this paper is its overview of the research and development efforts that have been endeavoured in the field, and the challenges that tourism researchers are, and will be, facing

Personalized Tourist Route Generation

When tourists are at a destination, they typically search for information in the Local Tourist Organizations. There, the staff determines the profile of the tourists and their restrictions. Combining this information with their up-to-date knowledge about the local attractions and public transportation, they suggest a personalized route for the tourist agenda. Finally, they fine tune up this route to better fit tourists' needs. We present an intelligent routing system to fulfil the same task. We divide this process in three steps: recommendation, route generation and route customization. We focus on the last two steps and analyze them. We model the tourist planning problem, integrating public transportation, as the Time Dependent Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (TDTOPTW) and we present an heuristic able to solve it on real-time. Finally, we show the prototype which generates and customizes routes in real-time

A new heuristic algorithm to create customized tourist routes

La adaptación de las actividades turísticas a sus preferencias es un elemento crucial para los turistas del siglo XXI. El presente artículo tiene por objetivo el proponer un nuevo algoritmo heurístico para la realización de rutas turísticas personalizadas en los centros históricos de las ciudades que pueda ser aplicado a plataformas web turísticas o aplicaciones para móviles. Para su consecución se ha hecho en primera instancia un análisis del estado de la cuestión que sirviera de marco de referencia. A continuación se explica el nuevo algoritmo, que consta de dos partes. En la primera se aborda el problema de determinar los puntos de interés que debe visitar el turista en base a sus predilecciones. Para ello se van a seleccionar los parámetros que se tendrán en cuenta y se propone un nuevo método para cuantificarlos. La segunda parte del algoritmo se centra en determinar el orden en que deben ser recorridos, buscando que la distancia sea lo menor posible. Se van a realizar agrupaciones de los distintos puntos de interés, y se van a unir entre sí. El resultado final es un algoritmo que se adapta a las preferencias dadas y que logra unos desplazamientos muy ajustados.The customization of tourism activities to the tourist preferences is crucial in the XXI century. This study aims to propose a new heuristic algorithm to create customized routes in historical city centers to be uploaded in web sites or mobile applications. First, a state of the art has been done followed by the description of the new algorithm proposed which consists of two different parts. In the first part, the attractions that the tourist should visit according to their preferences are selected together with the parameters and a new methodology to quantify them. In the second part, the study tries to determine the position of the attractions along the itinerary with the minimum distance between them. Finally, the attractions are grouped and linked together. The result is a customized algorithm to the tourist preferences which provides small distance walks.Este artículo se enmarca en el proyecto de investigación SIT-MAD, financiado por la Fundación Hergar

A mobile tour guide app for sustainable tourism

Portugal has had a flourishing tourism sector for the past few years. In fact, Portugal’s tourism boom has made the industry one of the biggest contributors to the national economy and the largest employer. In the year 2019, Portugal had a total of 27 million tourists, surpassing once again the record established in the previous year. However, tourism also brings a series of unintended negative side effects, such as overcrowding. The Santa Maria Maior historic district in Lisbon is being particularly affected by this problem. The work undertaken in this dissertation is part of the Sustainable Tourism Crowding project, that aims to mitigate the overcrowding phenomenon in this district, by fostering a balanced distribution of visitors while promoting the visitation of sustainable points of interest. This dissertation focuses on developing a mobile app prototype targeted at tourists, through which these sustainable walking tour recommendations can be delivered. To validate the functional requirements of the prototype, more specifically the trip creation process, a series of unit tests, integration tests, and manual tests were developed. To evaluate the usability of the prototype, a user-centered approach was adopted during the design stage, in which two usability techniques were conducted with members of ISCTE’s research center ISTAR and partners from the Junta de Freguesia de Santa Maria Maior, that guided and validated the decisions made. The achieved prototype contains mechanisms for measuring tourists’ adherence to the recommended tours using the Dynamic Time Warping algorithm, which raises new research opportunities on tourists’ behaviour.O desenvolvimento próspero do setor turístico em Portugal nos últimos anos fez da indústria um dos maiores contribuintes para a economia nacional e o maior empregador do país. No ano de 2019, Portugal recebeu um total de 27 milhões de turistas, ultrapassando uma vez mais uma vez o recorde estabelecido no ano anterior. No entanto, o turismo traz também uma série de efeitos secundários negativos não intencionais, tais como overcrowding. A freguesia histórica de Santa Maria Maior em Lisboa está a ser particularmente afetada por este problema. O trabalho desenvolvido nesta dissertação faz parte do projeto de pesquisa Sustainable Tourism Crowding, que visa mitigar o fenómeno de overcrowding nesta freguesia, promovendo uma distribuição equilibrada dos visitantes e incentivando a visita de pontos de interesse sustentáveis. Esta dissertação foca-se no desenvolvimento de uma aplicação móvel protótipo destinada a turistas, através do qual recebem recomendações de visitas sustentáveis. Para validar os requisitos funcionais do protótipo, mais especificamente o processo de criação de visitas, foram desenvolvidos testes unitários, testes de integração, e testes manuais. Para avaliar a usabilidade do protótipo, foi adotada uma abordagem centrada no utilizador durante a fase de conceção, em que foram utilizadas duas técnicas de usabilidade em parceria com o ISTAR (centro de investigação do ISCTE) e com a Junta de Freguesia de Santa Maria Maior, cujos resultados guiaram e validaram as decisões tomadas. O protótipo desenvolvido contém mecanismos para medir a aderência dos turistas às recomendações sugeridas através do algoritmo Dynamic Time Warping, proporcionando novas oportunidades de pesquisa nesta área