An evaluation of multiobjective urban tourist route planning with mobile devices

Abstract

Tourism is an emerging target area for interactive mobile device applications. This paper evaluates the performance of a multiobjective interactive urban route planner that calculates walking routes for tourists in urban areas. The system allows tourists to choose a walking route between two locations that is short, but at the same time traverses interesting tourist areas. The main characteristics of the system are an intuitive interactive interface, the management of multiple objectives, and local computation on the user's device. Related aspects, like the retrieval of contextual tourist information relevant to route planning, are also discussed. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.