Designing Ecotourism Routes with Time-Dependent Benefits along Arcs and Waiting Times at Nodes

Abstract

Ecotourism routes serve as powerful tools for fostering environmental awareness. To achieve this, it is crucial to design itineraries within natural parks that strike a balance between visitor experience and ecological preservation. Limiting the duration of visits prevents undue strain on both visitors and ecosystems. Effective routes should showcase high biodiversity, traversing diverse sites to enhance knowledge acquisition. Considering natural factors such as light conditions and climate, it is prudent to tailor visiting times to optimize the experience. Therefore, it makes sense to incorporate time-dependent benefits at arcs and the possibility of introducing waiting times at nodes in the design models. These two characteristics have enriched the optimization models developed to solve the tourist trip design problem based on maximizing benefit only when points of interest are visited. However, the specific application of these aforementioned characteristics and enriched optimization models to the arc orientation problem remains yet to be reported on and published in the literature. Our contribution addresses this gap, proposing a route design model with scenic value in the arches of the graph where the benefits perceived by travelers are maximized, taking into account a diversity of evaluations depending on the time of starting the trip through each arc.