Wouter Souffriau

• KU Leuven

Personalised electronic tourist guides (PETs) are mobile hand-held devices able to create tourist routes matching tourists' preferences. Transportation information has been identified as one of the most appreciated functionalities of a PET. We model the tourist planning problem, integrating public transportation, as the time-dependent team orientee...

This paper introduces the multiconstraint team orienteering problem with multiple time windows (MC-TOP-MTW). In the MC-TOP-MTW, a set of vertices is given, each with a service time, one or more time windows, and a score. The goal is to maximize the sum of the collected scores, by a fixed number of tours. The tours are limited in length and restrict...

In this paper, we present the travelling salesperson problem with hotel selection (TSPHS), an extension of the TSP with a number of interesting applications. We present a mathematical formulation, explain the difference with related optimization problems and indicate what makes this problem inherently more difficult. We develop a simple but efficie...

The Aircraft Weight and Balance Problem (AWBP) is a real-world combinatorial optimisation problem in which an aircraft should be loaded with containers in such a way that the total cargo value is maximised. At the same time the centre of gravity should approach an optimal point. Fly-ing optimally reduces fuel consumption and thus results in a finan...

Over the last few years, advanced digital applications have become available to tourists. Some of these offer the possibility of creating personalised routes. This paper introduces a tourist expert system, called the City Trip Planner, that allows planning routes for five cities in Belgium. It is implemented as a web application that takes into acc...

Traditional route planners assist in finding the shortest or fastest route from one place to another. This paper presents a novel approach to path finding in a directed graph, namely a target distance, motivated by the problem that a recreational cyclist deals with when searching a nice route of a certain length. The problem is defined as a variant...

During the last decade, a number of challenging applications in logistics, tourism and other fields were modelled as orienteering problems (OP). In the orienteering problem, a set of vertices is given, each with a score. The goal is to determine a path, limited in length, that visits some vertices and maximises the sum of the collected scores. In t...

When tourists visit a city or region, they usually cannot visit every point of interest available as they are constrained in time and budget. Tourist recommender applications help tourists by facilitating personal selection. Providing adequate tour scheduling support for these kinds of applications is a daunting task for the application developer....

Creating digital maps often requires driving around the streets in a so-called “mapping van”. Tele Atlas, the world leading supplier of maps and map data, uses a fleet of such vehicles to take pictures of streets and road signs. Minimising the number of days that a vehicle needs to traverse all streets in a given region gives rise to a capacitated...

This paper introduces a Path Relinking metaheuristic approach for solving the Team Orienteering Problem (TOP), a particular routing problem in which a score is earned for visiting a location. The objective is to maximise the sum of the scores, while not exceeding a time budget Tmax for travelling to the selected locations. In the case of the simple...

When tourists are at a destination, they typically search for information in the Local Tourist Organizations. There, the staff determines the profile of the tourists and their restrictions. Combining this information with their up-to-date knowledge about the local attractions and public transportation, they suggest a personalized route for the tour...

When tourists visit a city or region, they cannot visit every point of interest available, as they are constrained in time and budget. Tourist recommender applications help tourists by presenting a personal selection. Providing adequate tour scheduling support for these kinds of applications is a daunting task for the application developer. The obj...

The Time Dependent Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (TDOPTW) consists of a set of locations with associated time windows and scores. Visiting a location allows to collect its score as a reward. Traveling time between locations varies depending on the leave time. The objective is to obtain a route that maximizes the obtained score within a lim...

The company Tele Atlas utilises mobile mapping vans to take pictures of streets and road signs. The mobile mapping van problem tries to minimise the number of days required to travel through all streets in a region. Furthermore, hotels need to be selected to spend each night and the position of the sun should be taken into account while driving. Th...

A personalised electronic tourist guide assists tourists in planning and enjoying their trip. The planning problem that needs to be solved, in real-time, can be modelled as a team orienteering problem with time windows (TOPTW). In the TOPTW, a set of locations is given, each with a score, a service time and a time window. The goal is to maximise th...

We describe a patient admission scheduling algorithm that supports the operational decisions in a hospital. It involves efficiently assigning patients to beds in the appropriate departments, taking into account the medical needs of the patients as well as their preferences, while keeping the number of patients in the different departments balanced....

This paper presents different techniques that can be used to improve the metaheuristic design and insight in the problem at hand. The presented techniques are applied to analyse the performance of two different metaheuristics for the team orienteering problem. Furthermore, the parameter setting problem is discussed and the parameter “sensitivity” i...

In the team orienteering problem (TOP) a set of locations is given, each with a score. The goal is to determine a fixed number of routes, limited in length, that visit some locations and maximise the sum of the collected scores. This paper describes an algorithm that combines different local search heuristics to solve the TOP. Guided local search (...

This paper presents a mobile tourist decision support system that suggests personal trips, tailored to the user’s interests and context. The system enables planning a customised trip that maximises the interest of the tourist, while taking the opening hours of the points of interest (POI) and the available time into account. The planning problem is...

The aim of this paper is to present an overview of metaheuristics used in tourism and to introduce Skewed VNS to solve the team orienteering problem (TOP). Selecting the most interesting points of interest and designing a personalised tourist trip, can be modelled as a TOP with time windows (TOPTW). Guided local search (GLS) and variable neighbourh...

In recent years, a lot of work has been done for supporting the operational management of container handling operations in seaports. However, the train-to-train container transshipment problem, in which containers have to be interchanged between trains, has been largely ignored. Containers are handled by rail mounted cranes. The time needed for com...

Generating personalized tourist routes based on a tourist's interests and constraints is an upcom-ing trend in tourist applications. This problem can be directly related to the Multi Constrained Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (MCTOPTW). The MCTOPTW consists of a set of locations, each of them with a certain score, a time window and one...

Mobile tourist guides evolve towards automated personalized tour planning devices. The contribution of this article is to put forward a combined artificial intelligence and metaheuristic approach to solve tourist trip design problems (TTDP). The approach enables fast decision support for tourists on small footprint mobile devices. The orienteering...

Developing metaheuristics requires in general a lot of work tuning different parameters. This paper presents a two–level algorithm to tackle this problem: an upper–level algorithm is used to determine the most appropriate set of parameters for a lower–level metaheuristic. This approach is applied to an Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) metaheuristic th...

A new trend in home automation is to integrate audio en video applications. However in current domotics systems, these are usually conFigured statically. We implemented a home automation tool that dynamically (re)schedules bandwidth for different types of multimedia streams with different constraints toward latency and quality. The dynamic scheduli...

This demonstration paper presents a mobile tourist decision support system that suggests personal trips, tailored to the user's interests and context. The system enables planning a customised trip that maximises the interest of the tourist, while taking the opening hours of the points of interest and the available time into account. The planning pr...

This paper introduces a Greedy Randomised Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) for solving the Team Orienteering Problem (TOP). That is a particular routing problem in which a score is earned for visiting a location. The objective is to maximise the sum of the scores of a fixed number of routes, while not exceeding a given time budget for each route....