A Method to Plan Group Tours with Joining and Forking

SEAL2006 : Asia-Pacific Conference on Simulated Evolution and Learning , Oct 15-18, 2006 , Hefei, ChinaGroup sightseeing has some advantages in terms of required budget and so on. Some travel agents provide package tours of group sightseeing, but participants have to follow a predetermined schedule in tour, and thus there may be no plan which perfectly satisfies the tourist's expectation. In this paper, we formalize a problem to find group sightseeing schedules for each user from given users’ preferences and time restrictions corresponding to each destination. We also propose a Genetic Algorithm-based algorithm to solve the problem. We implemented and evaluated the method, and confirmed that our algorithm finds efficient routes for group sightseeing

A Personal Navigation System for Sightseeing across Multiple days

ICMU2006 : The Third International Conference on Mobile Computing and Ubiquitous Networking , Oct 11-13, 2006 , London, U.K.Recently, various personal navigation systems are available on the market. In this paper, we propose a new scheduling function to compose sightseeing tours across multiple days. Scheduling for multiple days is challenging since the number of possible sequences to travel destinations becomes huge and accommodation places have to be carefully chosen considering the schedules before and after each stay. So, some techniques are required to calculate the sightseeing schedule across multiple days at practically short time. In our method, we divide the target area into several sub-areas, and we restrict each day trip to be in a limited number of areas with infrequent passing of area boundary, in order to decrease the number of sequences. We have designed and implemented a genetic algorithm to solve this scheduling problem at a practical time. In this algorithm, accommodation places are represented in chromosome as exclusive alleles, to make schedules which contain only one accommodation place for each day. In order to evaluate our method, we made various sightseeing schedules across multiple days using the digital map of the Tohoku area (Japan Geographical Survey Institute numeric map 25000), and confirmed that the proposed algorithm could compute the near best 6 days schedule in several tens of seconds

A Personal Navigation System with Functions to Compose Tour Schedules Based on Multiple Conflicting Criteria

In order to allow tourists to travel to multiple destinations efficiently we need a personal navigation system which computes and shows the best route to the next destination and facilitates composition of a schedule for visiting those destinations taking account of various requirements such as relative importance among destinations time restrictions travel expenses and so on. There is sometimes a tradeoff between these requirements. In this paper we extend our existing personal navigation system called P-Tour in the following two ways: (1) allowing users to optimize their tour schedules under multiple conflicting criteria such as total expenses and satisfaction degrees; and (2) navigating users to the next destination in a more efficient way. We have implemented the above extensions and integrated them into P-Tour. Through some experiments we show the effectiveness of the proposed extensions