Route planning problem with groups of sightseeing sites classified by tourist´s sensitivity under Time-Expanded Network

This paper proposes a sightseeing route planning problem with time-dependent traveling times among sightseeing sites. Since traveling times are dependent on the time of day, Time-Expanded Network (TEN), which contains a copy to the set of nodes in the underlying static network for each discrete time step, is introduced. In addition, it is hard to set satisfaction values at sightseeing sites numerically due to tourist´s ambiguous sensitivity, but it is not difficult to classify sightseeing sites into several groups by the tourist. Therefore, the objective function of our proposed model is set to maximize the total visiting sightseeing sites in each group. The problem is a multiobjective programming problem, and hence, a principle of compromise is introduced to solve our proposed problem in network optimization. Furthermore, a strict algorithm is also developed to equivalently transform the main problem into the existing TEN-based problem.