Practical route planning algorithm

Abstract

Routing algorithms are traditionally considered to apply the sum of profits gathered at visited locations as an objective function since the Traveling Salesman Problem. This heritage disregards many practical considerations, hence the result of these models meet with user's needs rarely. Thus considering the importance of this theoretical and modeling problem, a novel objective function will be presented in this paper as an extension of the one inherited from the TSP that is more aligned with user preferences and aims to maximize the tourist's satisfaction. We also propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the Team Orienteering Problem with relatively low computation time in case of high number of vertices on the graph and multiple tour days. Based on the key performance indicators and user feedback the algorithm is suitable to be implemented in a GIS application considering that even a 3-day tour is designed less than 4 seconds.