We introduce a mechanism called “morphing” for introducing structure or randomness into a wide variety of problems. We illustrate the usefulness of morphing by performing several different experimental studies. These studies identify the impact of a “small-world” topology on the cost of coloring graphs, of asymmetry on the cost of finding the optimal TSP tour, and of the dimensionality of space...

While virtual tours have been around for some time, the ability to get a true sense of the location has not been adequately developed. As part of a partnership between our department and the Vatican, we have created a virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel using multiple locations and interactive menus to allow users to feel as though they are actually there. Not only does the virtual tour give use...

36 37 As tour-based methods for activity and travel participation patterns replaces trip-based methods, time-38 of-day (TOD) choice modeling remains problematic. In practice, most travel demand model systems 39 handle tour scheduling via joint-choice multinomial logit (MNL) models, which suffer from the well-40 known independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assumption. This paper introduce...

We present an approach for the traveling salesman problem with graph metric based on Steiner cycles. A Steiner cycle is a cycle that is required to contain some specified subset of vertices. For a graph G, if we can find a spanning tree T and a simple cycle that contains the vertices with odd-degree in T , then we show how to combine the classic “double spanning tree” algorithm with Christofide...

We consider the problem of reversing a tour (i1, i2, . . . , il) in a directed graph G = (V, E) with positive integer vertices V and edges E ⊆ V × V , where ij ∈ V and (ij, ij+1) ∈ E for all j = 1, . . . , l − 1. The tour can be processed in last-in-first-out order as long as the size of the corresponding stack does not exceed the available memory. This constraint is violated in most cases when...

The emphasis of this research is on the analysis of commercial vehicle tours. Tours are disaggregated by their routing constraints. The generation of Vehicle Kilometers Traveled (VKT) by tour type is analytically modeled and analyzed. The relative influence of the number of stops per tour, tour duration, and time window constraints on VKT is discussed using an analytical framework. Multistop to...

May 2010, 19 senior leaders participated in the 2010 Canadian College of Health Service Executives (College) Sweden study tour. The majority of participants were senior leaders from public and private healthcare organizations across Canada. One participant was from the United States of America and another from the United Kingdom. The 19 participant was the recipient of the 2010 ARAMARK-College ...

During June 2-8, 2009, an outbreak of influenza A pandemic (H1N1) 2009 occurred among 31 members of a tour group in China. To identify the mode of transmission and risk factors, we conducted a retrospective cohort investigation. The index case-patient was a female tourist from the United States. Secondary cases developed in 9 (30%) tour group members who had talked with the index case-patient a...

Electronic tour guides have been developed to personalise guided tours. Also, in contrast to traditional tours, electronic tour guides allow their users to abandon or modify tours at any time. Research as to whether users take advantage of these added capabilities is currently not available. A field trial was conducted comparing the behaviour of tourists as they were using a Planner providing a...