Digital ants as the best cicerones for museum visitors

In this paper we address the problem of personalization and automatic generation of museum visits with mobile devices guidance. We propose here a ubiquitous software and hardware infrastructure that supports, in a collaborative way, the generation of museum handheld-based visits. Particularly, we define the problem to be solved as an instance of the Orienteering Problem. We present an implementation of a distributed algorithm in which every computing element of the ubiquitous infrastructure contributes to the generation of sub-optimal solutions that meet the user requirements. Finally, we discuss some experimental results that validate the proposed ideas and the results obtained by a questionnaire answered by real visitors. This questionnaire was filled in during the largest deployment of this technology in Spain in which 100 Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) were made available to visitors as part of the exhibition "Sorolla: Vision of Spain". (c) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.