Multi-day tourism recommendations for urban tourists considering hotel selection: A heuristic optimization approach

Abstract

With the development of tourism, digital technology is increasingly being applied in the design of tourist routes. This study takes into account that tourists are experience-driven in tourism activities and hotel selections. In this study, the tourist trip design problem with hotel selection is formulated based on bi-objective optimization with total utility of the points of interest maximization and the average utility of the hotels maximization, and a three-step hybrid algorithm combined with discrete particle swarm optimization, an adaptive differential evolution with an optional external archive, and a local search is designed to identify the optimal route. To examine the performance of the designed algorithm, a numerical experiment was conducted. The results of Wilcoxon rank sum tests verified that the proposed algorithm performed distinctly better than extant approaches. Moreover, the results also indicate that the two main innovative mechanisms about initialization and hybrid evolution play a critical role in improving the algorithm's efficiency for the tourist trip design problem with hotel selection.