Algorithms for context-awareness route generation

Abstract

This work has as its main goal the investigation and experimentation on automatic generation of routes for tourists and visitors of points of interest, considering the knowledge of the routes, the profile of the visitor and the context awareness of the tour. The context of a trip can be taken through various sources of information, such as the location of the tourist, the time of the visit, the weather conditions, as well as relevant aspects and characteristics of the user's activity and profile. The developments of this work are part of TheRoute project, and its main goal is the development of a route generation module that considers the context of the tourist, the trip and the environmental constraints. In order to solve the proposed problem, two algorithmic solutions were developed. One is an adaption of the A* algorithm with cuts, while the other is based on Ant Colony Optimization, a Swarm Intelligence algorithm. The results from the experiments allowed to conclude that the A* with cuts, oriented to the heuristic for the path with the highest score, is the one that obtains the best conjugation of results for the defined satisfaction metrics.