Summary
The contribution of this work is to present how a series of Operations Research techniques can contribute to preparing a more pleasant trip for a tourist visiting a certain region. The techniques involved are the multi-attribute models, the traveling agent problem, the routing problem and the shortest route problem.
The model indicates which places to visit and which are the tourist corridors to follow, so that they provide you with greater satisfaction, in accordance with the restrictions established by it.
Abstract
The contribution of this paper is to present how a series of Operations Research techniques, can contribute to prepare a pleasant trip for a tourist visiting a certain Region. The involved techniques are: The multiattribute models, the traveling salesman problem, the vehicle routing problem and the problem of shorter route.
The model indicates which places to visit and which routes to follow, so that provides the greater satisfaction, according to the constraints the tourist established.
Introduction
The evolution of the communication media, which increasingly facilitate the management of Information, has achieved that those who wish to visit, especially for tourist purposes, a country, a city, place or place, each day become more demanding and regardless The reason for your visit, always determine a series of aspects that you hope will be satisfied in your trips, so that these are more pleasant, for which it is necessary that the different locations that wish to receive visitors, prepare for this tourist, and make efforts to maximize the satisfaction that could be provided.
When speaking of maximization, even of tourist satisfaction, it suggests Operations Research, and therefore the question arises as to whether it will not be possible to use algorithms to maximize the satisfaction of tourists, who visit with certain well-defined purposes. a certain place. As an answer to this question, the objective of this research arises: to create an algorithm, which from the order of preference, obtained through a multi-attribute model, that for a visitor has a set of tourist sites, indicates which one or which to visit and which are the tourist corridors to follow, so that they provide you with greater satisfaction, according to the restrictions established by it.
tourism
Tourism is not a science (Buollón, 1990, Dávila and Di Campo, 1997), since Tourism was not born from a theory, but from a spontaneous reality, while its components are material and not ideal. However, tourism has its rules, thus, for tourism to exist, it is necessary for the user to stay away from their usual home for at least one day and spend the night in a place other than that of
Your habitual residence. On the other hand (Cárdenas, 1991), receptive tourism and internal tourism are established, the latter being relative to the residents of a country, while the former refers to that which occurs in a country when residents of other nations arrive. with the intention of staying a limited time in it.
Another concept to highlight is the reference to tourist space, such as the presence and territorial distribution of tourist attractions, in which case we can speak of a tourist zone, tourist area or tourist center, depending on the size and area of influence of said space.
The concept of tourist corridors should also be highlighted, which are the means of connection between zones, areas, centers, attractions, ports of entry for receptive tourism and places of origin for domestic tourism, which function as the element that gives structure to the tourist space. These corridors will be analyzed from the point of view of route problems, and this is the next aspect to be discussed in this conceptual framework for the present work.
Route problems
Next, the route problems will be discussed, especially those that are of greatest interest when establishing tourist routes: the Shortest Route Problems, the Routing Problem and the Traveler Agent Problem.
Shorter path problems
Although other generalities can be presented, in general it can be stated: if in a network R (V, E, d), where d is a magnitude function called Distance, E represents the set of directed arcs or sides and V the set of vertices or nodes, you want to know some of the following aspects:
- the shortest path between any pair of vertices of V, the shortest path between a pair of them (x, y) perfectly defined, or the shortest path between one of them which can be denoted as origin or root (s)
Routing problems
Generally known as the vehicle routing problem, it can be said that it consists of visiting a group of customers, using a fleet of vehicles, respecting the restrictions of these vehicles, as well as restrictions of customers, drivers and the like, with the ultimate objective of minimizing the cost of the operation, which normally involves a combination of minimizing the distances traveled and the number of vehicles used, respecting that the vehicles leave a place and return to that same place.
Travel agent problems
The Traveling Salesman Problem is the typical problem of commercial visitors, who, starting from a locality of origin (root node), must visit, once and only once, a set of cities (remaining vertices of the graph), and return to the origin node, with the condition that the total route, according to the measurement parameter, is minimal.
Although there is already an optimal solution, even for a large number of cities, the problem of the traveling agent, and its variations are still being studied insistently, two of these variations are of capital importance for this work: The problem of the maximizing traveling agent and The problem of multiple traveling agents.
Travel agent maximization problems
The problem of the maximizing traveling agent is not as common as that of minimizing, which is the natural case, however, its presence is still interesting, and in general it can be pointed out, when you want to make the maximum travel, being a An interesting case of the problem of the maximizing traveling agent is that of a company that organizes concerts or traveling exhibitions, in different locations of a city, or different cities of a country and even in different countries of a continent, given that part of the public could be in neighboring towns, and it is not interesting to return to that environment immediately, but quite the opposite, as far away in time as possible, for which, instead of being interested in the minimum route, there is an interest in the maximum route.
Conclusions
The first conclusion is the integration that can be made of a set of operations research tools to solve a daily problem, such as establishing tourist routes that maximize the satisfaction of tourists.
It is not only necessary to talk about problems of shorter routes, as it is easy to expect, or the problem of routing or the traveling agent, where through them a better hierarchy is allowed and therefore to choose more appropriately, both the places that represent the greatest satisfaction, such as the routes that provide it.
A comment should also be made apart from the measure of satisfaction, which, although it is on a general scale, is actually specific to each individual and measures directly, and expressed by him, the more he is satisfied by a certain place or tourist corridor.
On the other hand, flexibility should be highlighted, since each tourist
It is handled independently, just as it is done with each day of your visit, which can be of different durations, and you could even separate the morning from the afternoon and the night or combine afternoon and night or morning and afternoon, without this means no difficulty.
In addition to the flexibility mentioned above, it should also be noted that operations research helps us estimate the time actually invested in each day of visit, as well as the estimated daily satisfaction, as well as the total, although this satisfaction scale, as already It was said, be proper for each tourist.
The use, albeit indirectly, of two variants should also be highlighted. From the problem of the traveling agent, the maximizing traveling agent, when maximizing satisfactions, and the multiple traveling agent, with multiple limiting factors, when managing limitations in time.
Bibliography
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