Personal tour planning incorporating standard tour routes and tourist satisfaction

This paper proposes a personal tour planning problem incorporating general tour routes and tourists satisfactions for sightseeing places based on some purposes of tourism. In order to construct a tour route, time-dependent satisfactions, traveling and activity duration times for sightseeing should be considered, but it is difficult to represent the time-dependent model using general static network models. Therefore, Time-Expanded Network (TEN) is introduced, which contains a copy to the set of nodes in the underlying static network for each discrete time step, and it turns the problem of determining an optimal flow over time into a classical static network flow problem. The proposed model is formulated as a bi-objective 0-1 integer programming problem maximizing the total satisfaction value and minimizing the difference from the best plan of standard tour routes. It also equivalently transformed into several existing tour planning problems using some natural assumptions and the concept of Pareto optimal solution, which can be applied existing useful combinatorial optimization and soft computing algorithms.