A Critical Analysis of a Tourist Trip Design Problem with Time-Dependent Recommendation Factors and Waiting Times

Abstract

The tourist trip design problem (TTDP) is a well-known extension of the orienteering problem, where the objective is to obtain an itinerary of points of interest for a tourist that maximizes his/her level of interest. In several situations, the interest of a point depends on when the point is visited, and the tourist may delay the arrival to a point in order to get a higher interest. In this paper, we present and discuss two variants of the TTDP with time-dependent recommendation factors (TTDP-TDRF), which may or may not take into account waiting times in order to have a better recommendation value. Using a mixed-integer linear programming solver, we provide solutions to 27 real-world instances. Although reasonable at first sight, we observed that including waiting times is not justified: in both cases (allowing or not waiting times) the quality of the solutions is almost the same, and the use of waiting times led to a model with higher solving times. This fact highlights the need to properly evaluate the benefits of making the problem model more complex than is actually needed.