Increasingly tourists are planning trips by themselves using the abundant information available on the Web, however they still expect and want trip plan advisory services. In this paper, we study the tour planning problem. Our goal in this problem is to design a tour trip of the most desirable sites, subject to various budget and time constraints. We first establish a framework for this problem, and then formulate it as a mixed integer linear programming problem. However, except when the problem size is relatively small, say, with less than 20-30 sites, it is computationally infeasible to solve the mixed-integer linear programming problem. Therefore, we propose a heuristic method based on local search ideas. The method is efficient and provides good approximation solutions. Numerical results are provided to validate the method.
By: Chenbo Zhu; J. Q. Hu; Yifan Xu; Fengchun Wang; Shun Jiang; Rongzeng Cao; Wei Ding
Published in: RC24780 in 2009
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