+Tour: Recommending personalized itineraries for smart tourism

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel algorithm for personalized tour itinerary recommendation that also optimizes MEC resource allocation, improving efficiency and user experience in next-generation smart tourism services.

Contribution

It presents an exact optimization algorithm that jointly recommends itineraries and allocates MEC resources, outperforming existing solutions in efficiency and user experience.

Findings

Up to 11% improvement in resource allocation efficiency.

Up to 40% enhancement in user experience.

Comparable performance to state-of-the-art in traditional metrics.

Abstract

Next-generation touristic services will rely on the advanced mobile networks' high bandwidth and low latency and the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) paradigm to provide fully immersive mobile experiences. As an integral part of travel planning systems, recommendation algorithms devise personalized tour itineraries for individual users considering the popularity of a city's Points of Interest (POIs) as well as the tourist preferences and constraints. However, in the context of next-generation touristic services, recommendation algorithms should also consider the applications (e.g., social network, mobile video streaming, mobile augmented reality) the tourist will consume in the POIs and the quality in which the MEC infrastructure will deliver such applications. In this paper, we address the joint problem of recommending personalized tour itineraries for tourists and efficiently allocating MEC resources for advanced touristic applications. We formulate an optimization problem that maximizes the itinerary of individual tourists while optimizing the resource allocation at the network edge. We then propose an exact algorithm that quickly solves the problem optimally, considering instances of realistic size. Using a real-world location-based photo-sharing database, we conduct and present an exploratory analysis to understand preferences and users' visiting patterns. Using this understanding, we propose a methodology to identify user interest in applications. Finally, we evaluate our algorithm using this dataset. Results show that our algorithm outperforms a modified version of a state-of-the-art solution for personalized tour itinerary recommendation, demonstrating gains up to 11% for resource allocation efficiency and 40% for user experience. In addition, our algorithm performs similarly to the modified state-of-the-art solution regarding traditional itinerary recommendation metrics.