A multi-modal tourist trip planner integrating road and pedestrian networks

Abstract

The Tourist Trip Design Problem aims to prescribe a sightseeing plan that maximizes tourist satisfaction while taking into account a multitude of parameters and constraints, such as the distances among points of interest, the expected duration of each visit, the opening hours of each attraction, the time available daily. In this article we deal with a variant of the problem in which the mobility environment consists of a pedestrian network and a road network. Hence, a plan includes a car tour with a number of stops from which pedestrian subtours to attractions (each with its own time windows) depart. We study the problem and develop a method to evaluate the feasibility of solutions in constant time, to speed up the search. The proposed method is embedded into an ad-hoc iterated local search. Experimental results show that our approach can handle realistic instances with up to 3643 points of interest (over a seven day planning horizon) in few seconds.