Contextual analysis of solutions in a tourist trip design problem: A fuzzy logic-based approach

Abstract

Tourist trip design is a fast-growing area of research. Tourist interest, budget, travel style, safety, and the existence of travelers with special needs (for example, wheelchair accessibility) are some of the elements to consider for obtaining personalized routes. Including these elements in a single mathematical model can considerably complicate the solution process. Also, route decision-making is affected by the context (health, social, political, economic, etc.) in which decisions are made. In this paper, the first aim is to propose a three-step methodology to obtain contextualized solutions to a tourist trip design problem (TTDP) with time-dependent recommendation factors. The methodology consists of (1) providing a basic TTDP model that avoids the complexity of including contextual information, (2) obtaining a set of solutions to the problem using a Modeling to Generate Alternatives (MGA) approach, and (3) using a recently developed a posteriori method to include the contextual information through fuzzy propositions. The second aim of the paper is to evaluate three algorithmic strategies for the MGA step. Lastly, considering a context for people with mobility impairments, an example is solved using real data. The results show the usefulness of the proposed methodology in solving the TTDP with contextual information.