Trip Planning Functionalities: State of the Art and Future

When tourists visit a city or region, they usually cannot visit every point of interest available as they are constrained in time and budget. Tourist recommender applications help tourists by facilitating personal selection. Providing adequate tour scheduling support for these kinds of applications is a daunting task for the application developer. The objective of this article is to demonstrate how existing models from the field of Operations Research (OR) fit this scheduling problem and enable a wide range of tourist trip planning functionalities. Using the Orienteering Problem (OP) and its extensions to model the tourist trip planning problem allows us to deal efficiently with a number of practical planning problems.