A new mathematical model and a heuristic algorithm for the tourist trip design problem under new constraints: a real-world application

The tourist trip design problem (TTDP) is about to generate routes for tourists to maximize the points of interest (POIs) visited within specific time windows. In this study, new constraints: budget, weather and break are considered. First, the budget is required for entrance fees and the distance between two points where a taxi has to be used. Additionally, the expense of the break was taken into account. Then, the weather was considered for summer and for other seasons. On a summer day, tourists are likely to prefer visiting POIs, which are indoor areas, between specific times e.g. 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. to protect against the side effects of the sun. Furthermore, tourists need to take a break to relax during the trip. A mathematical model of the TTDP with these new constraints (TTDP-BWB) was developed. Then, a heuristic algorithm was developed with a new defined function that took the new constraints into account. The algorithm was codded using Android Studio and developed a mobile application for the case of Eskisehir in Turkiye. Problems are generated on the small and medium scale for the case of Eskisehir and used large-scale problems from published literature. The results of the algorithm were compared with the results of the mathematical model for the small scale problems. Additional, large-scale problems from literature were solved to see the performance of the heuristic algorithm. Computational results showed that the algorithm is promising.