Bachelor's Thesis
Development of a Preference-Based Tour Planning System

KURATA, Yohei
Department of Urban Engineering, University of Tokyo

Advisor: Sadahiro, Y. and Okunuki, K.

Abstract

Due to the widespread use of the Internet, many cities have started providing their tourist information on WWW. However, such information sites are rather insufficient in a way because most of them only list sightseeing resources without showing any attractive route. To overcome this limitation, we developed a GIS-based system for tourist information, which indicates the most attractive tour route based on each userfs preference.

This system designs a tour route by the following procedure. First, this system prompts its user to answer 15 questions, which asks to compare two travel objectives (Fig 1). Then, the preferences of each individual are measured by Analytic Hierarchical Process (AHP). Second, each sightseeing resource in the city, such as museums and scenic spots, are evaluated from the viewpoint of calculated preference. Third, given these results, this system searches a tour route of the maximum score of preference subject to the given time, departure and destination constraints. Finally, the course is stored in GIS and displayed on screen (Fig 2).

A prototype system was applied to Yokohama, which is a well-known sightseeing city in Japan. The 75% of users who tested the system responded that they want to use this system.