Individual Tour Planning Assistance

For many people traveling to foreign countries and visiting interesting places is one of the most exciting activities that create long-lasting experiences. Consider, for example, traveling by car from Germany to Italy. There are several options to get from Germany to Italy, which involve crossing Austria, France, or Switzerland. When you reach the Italian border, do you prefer to take scenic routes along seacoasts, spend a couple of days in the inland enjoying Tuscany, or swim in the famous lakes Como and Garda? Are you sure that a visit to Pompeii is worth a long ride to the south? The cool Italian north burrows many unexpected treasures.

Here you will find videos that demonstrate selected use cases of a tour planning system, which has been developed during the doctoral thesis of Inessa Seifert at the University of Bremen, Germany.

This work has been done in the scope of the project R1-[ImageSpace] funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the framework of SFB TR/8 Spatial Cognition, University of Bremen.

What is the individual tour planning assistance all about?

Planning activities in an unfamiliar environment is a difficult task people have to deal with when preparing a journey to a foreign city or a country. A travel route has to fit into a pre-defined temporal scope of a journey and encompass different activities that take place in various locations. Travelers’ requirements for activity types and possible destinations are often vaguely specified: concrete locations or a temporal order of activities may be left open, or may be defined only at a coarse level of granularity.

The approach for assistance with tour planning tasks presented here goes beyond traditional navigation systems. Accessibility of information about different activity types and events provided by emerging Location-based Services (LBS) makes the requirements for user-friendly content delivery and support at planning tasks more demanding. The concepts underlying this tour planning system open perspectives for a new generation of navigation systems that support people at exploring and experiencing exotic countries and exciting terrains.

The proposed tour planning system processes user-defined plans that include spatial constraints at different levels of granularity. Such constraints can be specified as locations or regions, different activity types (e.g., swimming, hiking, or sightseeing), and a coarse route.

The user-defined plans are represented as a set of days (e.g., 2 weeks) together with a set of partially specified activities. Each activity is associated with an activity type (e.g. sightseeing), a location (e.g., Pompeii), and a duration (e.g., 2 days). The system proposes a tour that fulfills the given set of activity constraints and follows a coarse route. Such a tour can be subsequently modified, in order to obtain additional alternative solutions.