An object oriented intelligent tourist advisor system

This paper describes the design and development of an expert system for tourist information center. The expert system was built to recommend a suitable travel schedule that satisfies user input constraints such as time period, budget and preferences. Tourist center officers need to answer similar set of queries in their day-to-day work which could be replaced by an intelligent tourist advisor system. There are many different tourist information such as activities and places which can be stored as similar data structure and can be modeled into a object-oriented knowledge-based system. A highly generic knowledge structure is proposed to generalize the commonalties and eliminate duplication. The proposed knowledge structure would be flexible enough to cope with high volatility in some tourist information such as transportation routes. Object-oriented modeling has been used for the entire development of the proposed intelligent expert system. A case study is presented to demonstrate the benefits of such an approach for an expert system with repetitive and volatile problem domain. The system was developed using an expert system development environment Kappa-PC and was migrated to Power Builder. Such migration of the expert system demonstrates how conventional business decision support system can be integrated with expert system approach without using expert system shell. Furthermore, most of the expert system shell are either very expensive or provide very restricted features other than an inference engine such as lack of database engine, windowing facilities, etc. The proposed framework should be applicable to any popular event-driven development environments. An expert system will not be of practical use without a good user interface. The inference engine was partitioned as an object-oriented sub-system. Thus, another benefit of the proposed system is that the inference engine sub-system can be easily “plug-and-play” with other expert systems.