personalised tourist guide

[Pieter Vansteenwegen]

Nowadays, many tourists plan their vacation based on web sites, articles in magazines, or on guidebooks available in bookstores or libraries. These tourists visit a region or city during one or more days. During such a limited period, it is obviously impossible to visit everything and tourists select what they believe to be the most valuable attractions. Once the selection is made, they decide on the times to visit each attraction and a route between them. Tourists face several difficulties acting this way. The information provided in guidebooks is rarely up-to-date: opening hours change frequently, temporary exhibitions in museums change all the time, some attractions are (partly) closed due to renovation and theatres change their programme regularly. Based on the information in guidebooks or magazines it is also difficult to guess how long it will take to visit a place. Even selecting the most valuable attractions, i.e. those of greatest interest to the tourist, is not easy. Usually, tourists will be happy if they devise a somewhat attractive and feasible schedule, but they remain clueless whether or not better schedules are possible.
Current Mobile Tourist Guides support the comparison of up-to-date information and allow the user to quickly navigate along related pieces of information. They help tourists in choosing their destinations, they provide shortest routes between these destinations, etc. The do not propose, however, integrated holiday plans.

The Centre for Industrial Management is developing a Personalised Electronic Tourist Guide that integrates the selection of the most interesting attractions and composing a feasible trip to visit them.

We do not focus on the necessary hardware, but we focus on modelling and efficiently solving the so called “Tourist Trip Design Problem”. The Tourist Trip Design Problem is a planning problem to select the most interesting attractions, taking into account opening hours, budget and time constraints, public transportation, weather-dependent attraction values, conflicting preferences, etc.

The candidate will thus be working on a PhD in operational research. The exact topic within the frame of Tourist Trip Design can be further discussed.