Sustainable tourism: Application of optimization algorithms to schedule tour plans

Abstract

One of the challenging problems in the tourism industry is to maintain the environmental sustainability of the tourists attracted locations while giving a better user experience for the tourists. The proposed platform for sustainable tourism management system consist with following modules: A prediction module to predict an approximate value on tourist arrival for each location, an optimization algorithm module to decide the number of tourists that can be accommodated in each location considering the environmental sustainability, and an optimal path generating module to show the best route to each location. The optimization algorithm module is developed to decide the number of tourists for each location based on two approaches: Genetic Algorithms and Iterated Local Search. Next the optimal path generating module is developed based on traveling salesman problem.In this paper, the performances of the optimization algorithm module and the optimal path generating module is presented. Results show that, using the suggestions given by the algorithms help the tourist to enjoy a better experience in travelling while ensuring the sustainability in the tourism industry.