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

Automated Tourist Decision Support (Automatische beslissingsondersteuning in toerisme)

Wanneer toeristen een regio of stad bezoeken, kunnen ze niet elke attrac tie bezoeken wegens geld en tijdsbeperkingen. Aanbevelingssystemen helpen door e en beperkte selectie te suggereren. Automatische planningsondersteuning ontwikkelen voor deze systemen is een grote opportuniteit in het domein van Operationeel Onder zoek. Het doel van deze thesis is het ontwikkelen van effici¨nte techniek en die e een brede waaier van planningsfunctionaliteiten aanreiken aan toeristisc he beslissingsondersteunende applicaties. Het zogenaamde Orienteering Probl em is een integratie van een selectie en routeringsprobleem en is bijg evolg een beloftevol uitgangspunt om het toeristische planningsprobleem te modelle ren. In het eenvoudigste geval worden attracties voorgesteld door lokaties met e en score, die de persoonlijke interesse van de toerist reflecteert. Deze score kan berekend worden door middel van information retrieval technieken. Een tijds budget stelt de maximaal beschikbare tijd van de toerist voor. Effici¨ nte algoritmes om e dit probleem op te lossen worden ontwikkeld en laten toe om gepersonalis eerde stadswandelingen te plannen. Vervolgens wordt dit basismodel iteratief uitgebreid tot meerdere dagen, tijdsven- sters en meerdere beperkingen, met de bedoeling extra toeristische plann ingsfuncti- onaliteiten te kunnen aanbieden. Telkens wordt een wiskundig model gede& #64257;nieerd en een uitgebreide literatuurstudie uitgevoerd. Nieuwe oplossingstechnie ken worden ontwikkeld op basis van metaheuristische methodes, zoals guided local se arch, ant colony optimisation, variable neighbourhood search, greedy randomised ad aptive search, path relinking en iterated local search. Uitgebreide computation ele experimenten tonen de kwaliteit van de ontwikkelde technieken aan: nab&# 307; optimale resultaten worden behaald binnen beperkte rekentijden. Dit kleine ve rschil met het optimum is insignificant voor de toeristische toepassing, gezi en de inherente foutmarges eigen aan het kwantificeren van de persoonlijke int eresse in een attractie. Ten slotte worden twee toeristische beslissingsondersteunende applicatie s voor- gesteld. De City Trip Planner is een webapplicatie die toelaat om meerda agse stadsbezoeken te plannen in de vijf Vlaamse Kunststeden. De Cycle Ro ute Planner verstrekt fietsroutes op maat aan vrijetijdsfietsers in Oost Vlaanderen.status: publishe

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 efficiently with a vast number of practical planning problems

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 efficiently with a vast number of practical planning problems.status: publishe

Solving the mobile mapping van problem: A hybrid metaheuristic for capacitated arc routing with soft time windows

Creating digital maps often requires driving around the streets in a socalled “mapping van”. Tele Atlas, the world leading supplier of maps and map data, uses a fleet of such vehicles to take pictures of streets and road signs. Minimising the number of days that a vehicle needs to traverse all streets in a given region gives rise to a capacitated arc routing problem. A specific characteristic of this problem, however, is the fact that taking pictures in the direction of the sun should be avoided as much as possible. This requirement adds soft time windows to the problem. In this paper we solve the mobile mapping van problem by transforming it into a vehicle routing problem with soft time windows. We then apply a hybrid metaheuristic, consisting of a local search phase to decrease the number of days and an iterated local search phase to minimise the time window violations. An exact linear programming solver is embedded to calculate the ideal starting time of the vehicle in each street. Our method is tested on academic and real-life problem instances and shown to be effective.status: publishe

Personalized tourist guide: multi-constraint team orienteering problem with time windows

status: publishe

The orienteering problem: a survey

During the last decade, a number of challenging applications in logistics, tourism and other fields were modelled as orienteering problems (OP). In the orienteering problem, a set of vertices is given, each with a score. The goal is to determine a path, limited in length, that visits some vertices and maximises the sum of the collected scores. In this paper, the literature about the orienteering problem and its applications is reviewed. The OP is formally described and many relevant variants are presented. All published exact solution approaches and (meta)heuristics are discussed and compared. Interesting open research questions concerning the OP conclude this paper.status: publishe