Tour Planning for Sightseeing with Time-Dependent Satisfactions of Activities and Traveling Times

This paper proposes a new personal tour planning problem with time-dependent satisfactions, traveling and activity duration times for sightseeing. It is difficult to represent the time-dependent model using general static network models, and hence, Time-Expanded Network (TEN) is introduced. The TEN 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. Using the proposed TEN-based model, it is possible not only to construct various variations with time of costs and satisfactions flexibly in a single network, but also to select optimal departure places and accommodations according to the tour route with tourist’s favorite places and to obtain the time scheduling of tour route, simultaneously. The proposed model is formulated as a 0 - 1 integer programming problem which can be applied by existing useful combinatorial optimization and soft computing algorithms. It’s also equivalently transformed into several existing tour planning problems using some natural assumptions. Furthermore, comparing the proposed model with some previous models using a numerical example with time-dependent parameters, both the similarity of these models in the static network and the advantage of the proposed TEN-based model are obtained.