Tourist group itinerary design: When the firefly algorithm meets the n-person Battle of Sexes

Abstract

The presented research focuses on generating tourist trip itineraries for a group with different individual preferences on various points of interest. A set of walking routes among selected points of interest is provided by the Prize-Collecting Vehicle Routing Problem solution, considering several imposed constraints. However, the members of a tourist group request to stay together during their trip, despite their different preferences. Thus, to accommodate preferential heterogeneity in group itinerary design, the n-person Prize-Collecting Vehicle Routing Problem is proposed in this research, along with a novel, combined game theory and metaheuristic approach to solve it. Notably, the n-person Battle of Sexes game is utilized to configure a priori the set of locations to be visited, which results in three distinctive sets, depending on whether their visit is prohibited, mandatory, or optional. Consecutively, the metaheuristic firefly algorithm is employed to determine the tourist routes, enhanced with the coordinates-related encoding/decoding process. This process enables the original algorithm to solve discrete optimization problems without altering or hybridizing the original algorithmic framework. Compared with other metaheuristic algorithms, the proposed approach generates efficient and satisfactory tourist trip itineraries for heterogeneous groups.