Multi-day Trip Planning System with Collaborative Recommendation*

Planning a multi-day trip is a complex, yet time-consuming task. It usually starts with selecting a list of points of interest (POIs) worth visiting and then arranging them into an itinerary, taking into consideration various constraints and preferences. When choosing POIs to visit, one might ask friends to suggest them, search for information on the Web, or seek advice from travel agents; however, those options have their limitations. First, the knowledge of friends is limited to the places they have visited. Second, the tourism information on the internet may be vast, but at the same time, might cause one to invest a lot of time reading and filtering the information. Lastly, travel agents might be biased towards providers of certain travel products when suggesting itineraries. In recent years, many researchers have tried to deal with the huge amount of tourism information available on the internet. They explored the wisdom of the crowd through overwhelming images shared by people on social media sites. Furthermore, trip planning problems are usually formulated as ‘Tourist Trip Design Problems’, and are solved using various search algorithms with heuristics. Various recommendation systems with various techniques have been set up to cope with the overwhelming tourism information available on the internet. Prediction models of recommendation systems are typically built using a large dataset. However, sometimes such a dataset is not always available. For other models, especially those that require input from people, human computation has emerged as a powerful and inexpensive approach. This study proposes CYTRIP (Crowdsource Your TRIP), a multi-day trip itinerary planning system that draws on the collective intelligence of contributors in recommending POIs. In order to enable the crowd to collaboratively recommend POIs to users, CYTRIP provides a shared workspace. In the shared workspace, the crowd can recommend as many POIs to as many requesters as they can, and they can also vote on the POIs recommended by other people when they find them interesting. In CYTRIP, anyone can make a contribution by recommending POIs to requesters based on requesters’ specified preferences. CYTRIP takes input on the recommended POIs to build a multi-day trip itinerary taking into account the user’s preferences, the various time constraints, and the locations. The input then becomes a multi-day trip planning problem that is formulated in Planning Domain Definition Language 3(PDDL3). A sequence of actions formulated in a domain file is used to achieve the goals in the planning problem, which are the recommended POIs to be visited. The multi-day trip planning problem is a highly constrained problem. Sometimes, it is not feasible to visit all the recommended POIs with the limited resources available, such as the time the user can spend. In order to cope with an unachievable goal that can result in no solution for the other goals, CYTRIP selects a set of feasible POIs prior to the planning process. The planning problem is created for the selected POIs and fed into the planner. The solution returned by the planner is then parsed into a multi-day trip itinerary and displayed to the user on a map. The proposed system is implemented as a web-based application built using PHP on a CodeIgniter Web Framework. In order to evaluate the proposed system, an online experiment was conducted. From the online experiment, results show that with the help of the contributors, CYTRIP can plan and generate a multi-day trip itinerary that is tailored to the users’ preferences and bound by their constraints, such as location or time constraints. The contributors also find that CYTRIP is a useful tool for collecting POIs from the crowd and planning a multi-day trip.