Strategic and Crowd-Aware Itinerary Recommendation
This work addresses real-world crowd management issues in tourism planning, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for multi-user optimization.
The paper tackles the problem of itinerary planning for tourism by optimizing social welfare to address queuing time and crowd levels for multiple users, showing that their SCAIR algorithm outperforms baselines in handling the Selfish Routing problem in simulations.
There is a rapidly growing demand for itinerary planning in tourism but this task remains complex and difficult, especially when considering the need to optimize for queuing time and crowd levels for multiple users. This difficulty is further complicated by the large amount of parameters involved, i.e., attraction popularity, queuing time, walking time, operating hours, etc. Many recent works propose solutions based on the single-person perspective, but otherwise do not address real-world problems resulting from natural crowd behavior, such as the Selfish Routing problem, which describes the consequence of ineffective network and sub-optimal social outcome by leaving agents to decide freely. In this work, we propose the Strategic and Crowd-Aware Itinerary Recommendation (SCAIR) algorithm which optimizes social welfare in real-world situations. We formulate the strategy of route recommendation as Markov chains which enables our simulations to be carried out in poly-time. We then evaluate our proposed algorithm against various competitive and realistic baselines using a theme park dataset. Our simulation results highlight the existence of the Selfish Routing problem and show that SCAIR outperforms the baselines in handling this issue.