A Genetic Algorithm for Travel Itinerary Recommendation with Mandatory Points-of-Interest

Traveling as a very popular leisure activity enjoyed by many people all over the world. Typically, people would visit the POIs that are popular or special in a city and also have desired starting POIs (e.g., POIs that are close to their hotels) and destination POIs (e.g., POIs that are near train stations or airports). However, travelers often have limited travel time and are also unfamiliar with the wide range of Points-of-Interest (POIs) in a city, so that the itinerary planning is time-consuming and challenging. In this paper, we view this kind of itinerary planning as MandatoryTour problem, which is tourists have to construct an itinerary comprising a series of POIs of a city and including as many popular or special POIs as possible within their travel time budget. We term the most popular and special POIs as mandatory POIs in our paper. For solving the presented MandatoryTour problem, we propose a genetic algorithm GAM. We compare our approach against several baselines GA, MaxM, and GreedyM by using real-world datasets from the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100 Million Dataset (YFCC100M), which include POI visits of seven touristic cities. The experimental results show that GAM achieves better recommendation performance in terms of the mandatory POIs, POIs visited, time budget (travel time and visit duration), and profit (POI popularity).