Metaheuristics for Tourist Trip Planning

Pieter Vansteenwegen, Wouter Souffriau, Greet Vanden Berghe,

and Dirk Van Oudheusden

Abstract The aim of this paper is to present an overview of metaheuristics used in

tourism and to introduce skewed variable neighbourhood search 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 neighbourhood search (VNS)
are applied to efficiently solve the TOP. Iterated local search (ILS) is implemented
to solve the TOPTW. The GLS and VNS algorithms are compared with the best
known heuristics and applied on large problem sets. The obtained results are almost
of the same quality as the results of these heuristics but the computational time is
reduced significantly. For some of the problems VNS calculates new best solutions.
The results of the ILS algorithm, applied to large problem sets, have an average gap
with the optimal solution of only 2.7%, with much less computational effort.

Keywords Guided local search  Iterated local search  Team orienteering problem
with time windows  Variable neighbourhood search

1 Introduction

Many tourists visit a region or city during one or more days. It is obviously impos-
sible to visit everything and tourists want to select what they believe to be the most
attractive points of interest (POI). Nowadays, their selection is based on informa-
tion of web sites, articles in magazines, or on guidebooks available in bookstores or
libraries. Once the selection is made, the tourists decide on the time to visit each POI
and they choose a route between the points. Tourists face several difficulties acting
this way: information in guidebooks is rarely up-to-date, POIs are (partly) closed
due to renovation and some timetables (theatre, for example) are unavailable. Even

P. Vansteenwegen ()
Centre for Industrial Management, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 300a – bus
2422, 3001 Leuven, Belgium
e-mail: Pieter.Vansteenwegen@cib.kuleuven.be

M.J. Geiger et al. (eds.), Metaheuristics in the Service Industry, Lecture Notes in 15
Economics and Mathematical Systems 624, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-00939-6 2,
c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009
16 P. Vansteenwegen et al.

selecting the most attractive POIs is not easy. Usually, tourists are happy if they
devise a somewhat attractive and feasible schedule, but they remain clueless about
whether or not better schedules are possible.
Current Mobile Tourist Guides (MTG) such as Gulliver’s Genie [1], GUIDE [2],
CRUMPET [3], IMAGE [4] and Dynamic Tour Guide [5] support the comparison
of up-to-date information and allow the user to read related pieces of information.
They help tourists in choosing destinations, they provide shortest routes between
these destinations, etc. They do not propose, however, integrated holiday plans.
The next generation MTGs must provide a more integrated service. They will be-
come completely personalised, and selection, routing and scheduling features will
be enhanced.
Point of interest information and the user profile can be combined to determine
the value of any POI for a particular tourist [2, 6]. In composing a trip, the sum
of the POI values should be maximised, but the cost and available time are key
constraints. Obviously, other kinds of information are necessary as well: How many
days do tourists want to spend in a given region or city? Are they travelling by car?
Did they already visit this city before and are there POIs that they want to see again?
Next-generation MTGs will use these information components to suggest a personal
and feasible trip plan, including travelling directions.
In order to better model the problems tourists face in practice, the model should
be extended with some extra features. A few straightforward extensions are: opening
and closing times of POIs, budget limitations of tourists and trips of multiple days.
Another extension is that it may sometimes be worthwhile to follow a certain route,
for instance a drive through a beautiful canyon, when it is generally assumed that
POIs are situated at a specific location. Another complicated extension considers
the weather dependency of POI values. On a rainy day an open-air museum or a
panoramic view loses a lot of its value. The above-mentioned problem to suggest
personal tourist trips can be modelled as a tourist trip design problem (TTDP) [7].
This paper presents three different metaheuristics to solve trip planning prob-
lems in tourism. In the next section, the TTDP is discussed in more detail. Section 3
describes a guided local search algorithm and a variable neighbourhood search algo-
rithm to tackle one variant of the TTDP. In Sect. 4, an iterated local search algorithm
that deals with another variant of the TTDP is presented. Section 5 concludes the
paper.

2 Tourist Trip Design Problem

In its simplest formulation the TTDP can be considered to be identical with the
orienteering problem (OP) [8]. In the OP a set of n locations i is given, each with
a score Si . The starting point (location 1) and the end point (location n) are fixed
and can coincide. The time needed to travel from location i to j is known for all
locations. Not all locations can be visited since the available time is limited to a
given time budget Tmax . The goal of the OP is to determine a route, limited by Tmax ,
Metaheuristics for Tourist Trip Planning 17

that visits some of the locations, in order to maximise the total collected score. Each
location can be visited at most once. The OP differs from the well-known travelling
salesperson problem (TSP) in that its goal is to maximise the total score collected
instead of minimising the travel time/distance. Furthermore, not all locations have
to be visited in the OP. Of course, determining the shortest path between the selected
locations will be useful to visit as many locations as possible in the available time.
The OP can be extended with time windows and multiple-day planning. This is
called the team orienteering problem with time windows (TOPTW). The team ori-
enteering problem (TOP) is an OP for which the goal is to determine m routes, each
limited to Tmax , that maximise the total collected score. In the TOPTW the locations
have a service or visiting time Ti and a time window that should be respected.
The OP [8] is also known as the selective travelling salesperson problem [9], the
maximum collection problem [10] and the bank robber problem [11]. Furthermore,
the OP can be formulated as a special case of the resource constrained travelling
salesperson problem [12], as a travelling salesperson problem with profits [13] or as
a resource constrained elementary shortest path problem [14].
Many (T)OP applications are described in the literature: the sport game of ori-
enteering [15], the home fuel delivery problem [16], athlete recruiting from high
schools [10], routing technicians to service customers [17], etc. Usually, most of
these applications also require time windows and, as a consequence, the TOPTW
model can be applied to many real life situations.
The best published heuristics for the TOP are described in Archetti et al. [18].
They implement variable neighbourhood search and tabu search algorithms. A de-
tailed and extended review of many algorithms for the OP and the TOP can be found
in Tang and Miller-Hooks [17]. Many articles have been published regarding vehicle
routing with time windows. Yet, only three articles deal with the OPTW [14,19,20],
none were found about the TOPTW.
Righini and Salani [14] apply bi-directional dynamic programming to solve the
OPTW to optimality. Bar-Yehuda et al. [20] also mention the OPTW, but only for
the special cases where all points have the same score and points are situated on a
line or in the Euclidean plane. They do not consider time limits on the route duration.
This paper presents a guided local search algorithm and a variable neighbourhood
search algorithm to solve the TOP and an iterated local search algorithm to solve
the TOPTW. The algorithms are tested on large problem sets and the results are
compared with the results of the best published algorithms.

3 Guided Local Search and Variable Neighbourhood

Search for the TOP

In this section, two metaheuristic frameworks are applied to solve the team orien-
teering problem (without time windows). Both algorithms apply similar local search
procedures to find a high quality solution. First, all these procedures are explained.
18 P. Vansteenwegen et al.

Next, the two frameworks implementing these procedures are clarified. Finally, the
results obtained by these metaheuristics are compared with each other and with the
best published results.

3.1 Procedures

Construction Procedure
As a construction heuristic (Construct) the “Initialisation method” described by
Chao et al. [21] is used. First, all points that cannot be reached are removed from the
problem. Then, a fixed number of points, furthest from the start and end point, are
selected. Each of the m routes is started by assigning one of these chosen points to
the route (m is the number of routes). Next, all the remaining points are inserted into
these m routes using cheapest insertion, by only looking at the distance, not at the
score. If all m routes exhaust the time budget and unassigned points remain, new
routes are constructed with these points (using cheapest insertion) until all points
are assigned. Finally, the best m routes are selected to start the remaining part of the
algorithm.

Intensification Procedures
First, five moves are discussed that increase the total score of the solution: Insert,
TwoInsert, Replace, TwoReplace and Change. Next, two moves are described that
reduce the travel time between the selected points: TwoOpt and Swap. Finding the
shortest route between the selected points is not an explicit part of the TOP objective.
However, the shorter the route, the more likely extra points can be added to that route
later:
1. The Insert move tries to visit one point extra. Only the least time consuming and
feasible position to include each extra point is retained.
2. The TwoInsert move tries to visit two extra points. For each combination of two
not yet included points, the least time consuming and feasible positions to in-
clude each of the points in the same route are considered. If both points should
be inserted in the same position, the best sequence to insert the two points in the
route should be determined. The move is only considered if the total insertion
time is smaller than the available time budget.
3. For the Replace move all non-included points are considered for insertion. For
every point it is checked what would be the least time consuming position in
the route to include that point. If enough time budget is available for insertion,
the point is inserted. If the remaining budget is insufficient, all included points
with a lower score are considered for exclusion. If excluding one of these points
from the route creates enough time to insert the non-included point under con-
sideration, a replacement will be carried out: the included node will be excluded,
and the non-included node will be inserted at its least time consuming position.
Metaheuristics for Tourist Trip Planning 19

4. For the TwoReplace move all combinations of two non-included points are
considered for insertion. For each combination, the least time consuming and
feasible positions to include each of the points in the same route are considered.
If necessary, two successive included points are considered for exclusion to make
the insertion feasible. Only TwoReplace moves that increase the total score are
considered.
5. The Change move generates neighbours in an opposite way to Replace and
TwoReplace. Change first removes five successive points in a route to increase
the available time budget for insertion. Next, the non-included points are sorted
based on their score and, if feasible, they are inserted one by one on the least
time consuming position, until no more points can be inserted. If the removal
and the insertion result in a higher total score, the new solution is accepted as
a neighbour. Otherwise, no neighbour is determined and the next five points are
removed.
6. A very popular move to reduce the travel time between selected cities is TwoOpt
[22]. TwoOpt removes two edges from the route to replace them with two new
edges not previously included in the route. The route has to remain closed and
the total travel time should be reduced.
7. A Swap exchanges two points belonging to different routes. If time can be saved
in each route by this exchange, or if the time saved in one route is longer than
the extra time needed in the other route, the new solution is added to the Swap
neighbourhood. Of course, the available time budget of both routes has to be
respected.
Insert, TwoInsert, Replace, TwoReplace and TwoOpt are single-route proce-
dures that simultaneously operate on several routes. Change is applied to each
route separately.

Diversification Procedures
Three different procedures are used to diversify the search. Diversifying is often
used to escape local optima. Remove and Disturb simply remove a certain num-
ber of successive points in each route. Group tries to gather the available budget
spread over different routes within the current solution into a single route in the new
solution:
1. Group tries to bring together the available time left in different routes. For most
problems, it is better to have a lot of time available in one route and no time left
in the other routes, than to have a little time available in each route. In the former
case, it is more likely that another point can be added to the solution. Group
is constructed based on this observation. For each included point the possibility
of moving it to another route is calculated. If possible, the point is moved from
its original route to the new route. In this way, time is made available in the
original route and this time can be used to insert a new point later. Obviously, the
algorithm guarantees that as soon as a point is removed from a route, no other
points can be moved to the route by this procedure. This is necessary to avoid
that the available time left in this route is first increased but later decreased.
20 P. Vansteenwegen et al.

2. Remove works with two parameters. The first parameter determines the number
of successive points to be removed from each route. The second parameter deter-
mines the position in every route to start the removal. If the end point of a route
is reached before a sufficient number of points is removed, removing continues
from the start point. The position to start removing is always the position after
the last removal during the previous phase.
3. Disturb removes a part of each route in a different way than Remove. It removes
a fixed percentage of points between the starting point and the end point, either
at the beginning or at the end of the route, depending on the moment that this
heuristic is used in the algorithm.

3.2 Guided Local Search

Framework
Guided Local Search (GLS) was developed by Voudouris and Tsang [23]. GLS
penalises, based on a utility function, unwanted solution features during each local
search iteration. The penalty decreases the objective function during every iteration.
It allows the solution procedure to escape from local optima and to continue the
search.
The GLS algorithm implements Insert, Replace, TwoOpt, Swap, Disturb and
Group. All moves, except Disturb, are used as a local search heuristic. This means
that a move is applied until no more improvements are possible. For instance, the
Insert move will be applied until no more points can be inserted.
Before GLS was applied, a test run with a combination of the above-mentioned
moves showed that the Replace heuristic was the most contributing to increase the
score and the TwoOpt heuristic was the most contributing to reduce travel time. In
order to improve these heuristics, GLS is applied to Replace and TwoOpt. We did
not apply GLS to all the moves because that would be too time consuming.
In order to escape from the local optimum obtained by the Replace heuristic,
two GLS penalties are used. The first “penalty” increases the score of the non-
included point with the highest score. The second penalty decreases the score of the
included point with the lowest score and removes it from the route. After applying
these penalties and rewards, the Replace heuristic is used again during the next iter-
ation step, but always with the modified scores. The GLS iteration steps are carried
out a fixed number of times. At the end of each iteration, the real total score, without
the penalties, is calculated and the best route is saved.
In order to escape from the local optimum obtained by the TwoOpt heuristic, the
GLS framework penalises the longest arc in the current solution. After penalisation,
TwoOpt local search is used once more during the next iteration step, but always
with the increased distances. The GLS iteration steps are carried out a fixed number
of times. At the end of each iteration, the real total distance, without the penalties,
is calculated and the best route is saved.
Metaheuristics for Tourist Trip Planning 21

Algorithm Structure
Algorithm 1 presents the pseudo code of the GLS algorithm.

Algorithm 1: The GLS algorithm’s pseudo-code

Construct;
ALG Loop D 0;
while ALG Loop < 10 do
ALG Loop C1;
LS Loop D 0;
while Solution improved and LS Loop < 10 do
LS Loop C1;
Swap local search;
TwoOpt guided local search;
Swap local search;
Group local search;
Insert local search;
Replace guided local search;
end
if Solution better than BestFound then
BestFound D Solution;
else if Solution DD Bestfound then
if Not Disturbed before then
Disturb;
else
Return BestFound;
end
end
if ALG Loop DD 5 then
Disturb;
end
end
Return BestFound;

The algorithm starts with Construct. Afterwards the local search heuristics are
implemented in two loops: the Algorithm loop (ALG Loop) and the Local Search
Loop (LS Loop). The LS Loop is embedded in the ALG Loop. The ALG Loop
starts with the LS Loop, disturbs the constructed routes when necessary and ends
the algorithm after 10 iterations. The LS Loop applies the local search meth-
ods Swap, TwoOpt, Group, Insert and Replace in a fixed sequence and ends after
10 iterations or, to reduce the calculation time, if the current solution is not im-
proved by LS Loop. ALG Loop and LS Loop are both limited to 10 iterations
because increasing this parameter does not significantly improve the results and
only causes longer computation times. The GLS algorithm is described in detail in
Vansteenwegen et al. [24].
22 P. Vansteenwegen et al.

3.3 Skewed Variable Neighbourhood Search

Framework
VNS is a metaheuristic developed by Hansen and Mladenovic [25] that systemati-
cally exploits the idea of changing the neighbourhood, both in moving to the local
optima (“local search”) as in escaping from the local optima (“shaking”). VNS has
the advantages that the basic schemes are simple and require few or no parameters
and that very high-quality solutions are obtained for many problems. Skewed VNS
(SVNS) is a modification of VNS that is often used for problems that have several
separated and possibly far apart valleys containing near-optimal solutions. To better
explore the search space far away from the current best solution, a solution could be
accepted, that is not necessarily as good as the best one known, provided that it is far
from the current solution. This is the “recenter” part of SVNS. A distance measure
between solutions should be defined to apply this VNS variant.

Algorithm Structure
In this SVNS algorithm all the intensification moves are used to generate neighbour-
hoods. Group and Remove are used for diversification, Disturb is not applied in this
algorithm. During Remove, the number of points that are removed in each route, is
equal to the parameter k of the SVNS framework (Algorithm 2).
The recenter part of the algorithm, typical for SVNS, needs some extra explana-
tion. If the result from the shaking phase and local search (x 00 ), is better than the
best solution yet (x), the search is recentered: x 00 is assigned to x and the new so-
lution becomes the best solution. Typical to Skewed VNS, the search will also be
recentered when x 00 is slightly worse than x, provided that the distance between x 00
and x is large enough. In this case, the distance between two solutions is defined as
the number of points that are present in x 00 but not in x. If the search is recentered,
k is initialised to 1, otherwise, k is increased by 1. Only when the total score actu-
ally increases, the number of iterations with no improvements (NoImprovement)
is initialised to 0. In all other cases, NoImprovement is increased by 1.

3.4 Results

The algorithms were tested on a large number of test problems and compared with
published results. Test sets were used from Chao [26] and from Tang and Miller-
Hooks [17]. The best results for the TOP were published by Archetti et al. [18].
All experiments were carried out on a personal computer Intel Pentium 4 with
2.80 GHz and 1 GB RAM. It has the same specifications as the computer used by
Archetti et al. [18].
All the test results are summarised in Tables 1–3 (with n, the number of loca-
tions and m, the number of routes). For the diamond-shaped and square-shaped test
Metaheuristics for Tourist Trip Planning 23

Algorithm 2: Structure of the SVNS algorithm

Set of local search moves (Nj ): Insert, TwoOpt, Swap, Replace,TwoInsert, TwoReplace,
Change;
Construct ! x;
while NoImprovement < 40 do
k D 0;
while k < 25 do
Shaking: alternate between Remove.x; k/ and Group.x/ ! x 0 ;
j D 0;
Local Search:
while j < 7 do
Find best neighbor in Nj .x 0 / ! x 00 ;
if x 00 is better than x 0 then
x 0 D x 00 ;
j D 0;
else
j C 1;
end
end
Recenter or not:
if x 00 is better than x then
x D x 00 ;
k D 0;
NoImprovement D 0;
if x is better than BestFound then
Bestfound D x;
end
else
NoImprovement C1;
if x 00 is slightly worse than x, but x 00 is far from x then
x D x 00 ;
k D 0;
else
k C 1;
end
end
end
end
Return BestFound;

problems of Chao, the GLS algorithm (GLS) performs almost as well as Chao’s
algorithm (CHAO) and the SVNS algorithm (SVNS) performs better. The average
gap between the GLS and CHAO is 0.56%, the performance of SVNS is 0.24% better
than CHAO. For both algorithms the computational times are reduced substantially.
CHAO was executed on a SUN 4/370 workstation. On test sets 1 and 3 of Chao,
GLS performs almost as well as the tabu search heuristic of Tang et al. (TST) and
SVNS performs better. Again, the average computational time is reduced. TST was
executed on a DEC Alpha XP1000 computer with 1 GB RAM and 1.5 GB swap.
24 P. Vansteenwegen et al.

Table 1 Average score gap

Average score gap GLS SVNS
Name (number of problems) n m CHAO TST ARCH CHAO TST ARCH
Diamond-shaped (14) 64 1 0.23 0.33
Square-shaped (26) 66 1 0.74 0.20
Set 1 and 3 (24) 32;33 2,3,4 0.16 0.42
Set 4 (56) 100 2,3,4 0.93 1.67 0.55 0.20
Set 5 (74) 66 2,3,4 0.61 1.27 0.49 0.18
Set 6 (24) 64 2,3,4 0.61 0.99 0.18 0.20
Set 7 (58) 102 2,3,4 2.24 2.17 0.11 0.04

Table 2 Number of times GLS and SVNS perform better than, equal to or worse
than other algorithms
GLS SVNS
CHAO TST ARCH CHAO TST ARCH
Better 8 46 17 11 80 49
Equal 18 83 75 28 105 99
Worse 14 107 120 1 51 64
Total number of problems 40 236 212 40 236 212
the comparison is based on

Table 3 Average CPU times compared to other algorithms

Average CPU (s)
Name n m GLS SVNS CHAO TST ARCH
Diamond-shaped 64 1 2:8 2.6 177.0
Square-shaped 66 1 2.5 2.6 158.6
Set 1 and 3 32;33 2,3,4 1:1 0.2 2:1
Set 4 100 2,3,4 11:4 7.4 193:2 22:5
Set 5 66 2,3,4 3:5 1.5 23:6 34:2
Set 6 64 2,3,4 4:3 1.9 18:9 8:7
Set 7 102 2,3,4 12:1 4.3 104:8 10:3

The results for test sets 4–7 are compared with TST and with the “z min value”
of the “FAST VNS FEASIBLE” algorithm of Archetti et al. [18] (ARCH). The
obtained solutions of TST and ARCH are slightly better than GLS, on average
1.04% and 1.59%. SVNS outperforms TST (0.32%) but is slightly worse than ARCH
(0.15%). However, the computational times of GLS and SVNS are lower.
The SVNS framework clearly outperforms the GLS algorithm. The obtained
scores are higher, and the computational time is smaller. For 11 problems SVNS
calculates better results than the best published results so far. The new best routes
are presented in Table 5 in Appendix.
Metaheuristics for Tourist Trip Planning 25

4 Iterated Local Search for the TOPTW

For the team orienteering problem with time windows, a straightforward and fast
iterated local search (ILS) heuristic, which performs very well on the available data
sets, has been developed. The heuristic combines an insertion step and a shaking step
to escape from local optima. ILS is described by Lourenço et al. [27]. A sequence
of local search solutions is built up, instead of repeating random local search trials.
A good balance between improving and shaking intermediate solutions is essential.

4.1 Insertion Step

Insert is a local search heuristic that adds new points to a route, one by one. Before
an extra visit to a point can be inserted in a route, it should be verified that all
visits to other points, scheduled after the insertion position, still satisfy their time
window after insertion. In order to develop a fast heuristic, a quick evaluation of
each possible insert move is necessary. Checking, every time, all other visits on
their feasibility would consume too much time. This can be avoided by recording
MaxShift for each included point. MaxShift is defined as the maximum time
the service completion of a given visit can be delayed, without making any visit
infeasible. Another useful concept is Wait, i. e. the waiting time in case the arrival
at a point takes place before the start of the time window. The service itself can only
start when the time window opens. If the arrival takes place during the time window,
Wait equals zero.
For a feasible insertion of a new visit j between visits i and k, the total time
consumption of visit j should be limited to the sum of Wait and MaxShift of
visit k. Obviously, service j should also fit the time window of point j .
For each visit that can be inserted, the smallest required insertion time is deter-
mined. The visit with the highest ratio “square of point score over insertion time”
will be selected for insertion. The score is applied to the power two because, due
to time windows and waiting, insertion time becomes less relevant than score for
adding new visits to the route. All the steps mentioned above do not require much
computation time since only very simple and quick evaluations are used, thanks to
the MaxShift recording. After each insertion, all the other visits should be up-
dated. Visits after the insertion require an update of Wait, the arrival time, the start
of the service, the leave time and MaxShift. Visits before the insertion may re-
quire an update of MaxShift.

4.2 Shake Step

Shake is used to escape from local optima. During this step, one or more visits will
be removed. Shake uses two parameters as input, the first one indicates how many
26 P. Vansteenwegen et al.

consecutive visits to remove in each route (NumberToRemove), the second indi-

cates the place in each route to start the removing process (StartPosition). If
during the removal the end point is reached, the removal continues after the start
point. After the removal, all the visits following the removed visits are shifted for-
ward as much as possible, in order to avoid unnecessary waiting. These visits should
be updated similarly to the updating in the Insert Step. For the visits before the re-
moved visits only MaxShift should be updated.

4.3 The Iterated Local Search Heuristic

Algorithm 3 presents the heuristic’s pseudo code. The heuristic starts with empty
routes and initialises all the parameters of Shake to one. The heuristic runs through
a loop until no improvements for the incumbent best solution are identified during
a fixed number of iterations. Firstly the Insert local search is applied until a lo-
cal optimum is reached. If this solution is better than the incumbent solution, the
solution is recorded and NumberToRemove is reset to one for the next Shake.
Secondly Shake is applied. After each shake step, StartPosition is increased
by the value NumberToRemove and NumberToRemove is increased by one. If
StartPosition equals the size of the smallest route, this size is subtracted to
determine the new position. If NumberToRemove equals 30, it is reset to one.

Algorithm 3: The ILS algorithm’s pseudo code

StartPosition D 1;
NumberToRemove D 1;
NumberOfTimesNoImprovement D 0;
while NumberOfTimesNoImprovement < 150 do
Insert local search;
if Solution better than BestFound then
BestFound D Solution;
NumberToRemove D 1;
NumberOfTimesNoImprovement D 0;
else
NumberOfTimesNoImprovement C1;
end
Shake Solution (NumberToRemove, StartPosition);
StartPosition D StartPosition + NumberToRemove;
NumberToRemove C1;
if StartPosition > Size of smallest route then
StartPosition D StartPosition  Size of smallest route;
end
if NumberToRemove DD n=3m then
NumberToRemove D 1;
end
end
Return BestFound;
Metaheuristics for Tourist Trip Planning 27

By using the shake parameters as described above, other visits are removed dur-
ing every Shake Step and during the entire procedure, most likely, every visit is
removed at least once. This proves to be an excellent technique to better explore the
entire solution space and to correct wrong decisions which were earlier taken im-
plicitly by the Insertion Step. This property is enhanced by the fact that the heuristic
always continues the search from the current solution, it never returns to the best
solution found. This technique is called iterated local search with a random walk
acceptance criterion [27]. n
The maximum number of locations to remove 3m and the maximum number of
iterations without improvement (150) are the only parameters to predetermine in this
heuristic. For the maximum number of locations to remove, a percentage of mn (num-
ber of locations/number of routes) is used. Changing this percentage, from mn to 5m n
,
has no significant effect on the quality of the results or computation times. Further-
more, it appeared that further increasing the maximum number of iterations without
improvement does not significantly improve the results and only causes longer com-
putation times. The ILS algorithm is described in more detail in Vansteenwegen
et al. [28].

4.4 Results

The ILS algorithm was tested on the available test problems and compared with
optimal results published by Righini and Salani [14]. Righini and Salani created
58 problems for the OPTW using Solomon’s data set of vehicle routing problems
with time windows and ten problems of multi-depot vehicle routing problems of
Cordeau, Gendreau and Laporte.
Since for TOPTW no data sets are available, two new sets of 68 and 39 problems
are created based on the data sets of Righini and Salani. The first data set uses all
the instances from Righini and Salani (68), but with the number of routes equal to
two instead of one. In this case two times the optimal score of the original problem
is used as a benchmark for the obtained total score. This is obviously an overesti-
mation since the optimal result can never be higher, but it can be much lower than
this number. The second data set uses the original instances from Solomon (29)
and Cordeau et al. (10), with the number of routes equal to the number of vehicles.
With this number of routes it is possible to visit every point and hence the opti-
mal result equals the sum of all scores. Since these problems have up to 20 routes
they should be regarded as very complicated TOPTW. All computations were car-
ried out on a personal computer Intel Pentium 4 with 1.80 GHz processor and 1 GB
RAM. Righini and Salani did their calculations on a comparable PC Pentium 4 with
1.6 GHz processor and 512 MB RAM.
The average gap with the optimal solution for all the OPTW instances is only
1.8%. In the worst case, with 288 points, the gap is 9.4% and in 32 of the 68
cases the optimal solution is obtained. The average calculation time for Solomon’s
instances is only 0.4 s, compared to more than 400 s with the fastest method of
Righini and Salani.
28 P. Vansteenwegen et al.

Table 4 Average CPU times compared to other algorithms

Score GAP (%) CPU (s)
m Number of instances With Average Worst Average Worst
1 68 Optimal 1:8 9:4 1:0 14:0
2 68 UB 10:0 24:0 3:7 56:8
3–20 39 Optimal 2:1 10:0 17:9 177:0

Even for the TOPTW with m equal to two, the average gap with the upper bound
remains acceptable. For the TOPTW with up to 20 routes, the average gap with the
optimal solution for all these problems is only 2.1%. The worst score has a gap
of 10.0%. Of course, the computation time for these very complicated problems is
much longer, due to the many routes that have to be constructed and improved. The
computation time is on average 47.1 s. Yet, the average computation time is still
many times shorter than the computation time Righini and Salani needed to solve
the problems with only one route. All the test results are summarised in Table 4.
As an example, the results for the TOPTW of Cordeau et al. with 3–20 routes are
presented in Table 6 in Appendix.
Finally, it should be noticed that in this case always the exact distance between
two points is used, where Righini and Salani always rounded down the distance to
the first (Solomon) or second (Cordeau et al.) decimal. Obviously, rounding down
distances makes it sometimes possible to add an extra visit.

5 Conclusions and Further Work

Many optimisation problems occur in tourism. In this paper three different meta-
heuristics are presented to solve variants of the tourist trip design problem. Obvi-
ously, the tourism sector has many more opportunities for operational research and
metaheuristics [7].
The presented guided local search (GLS) and skewed variable neighbourhood
search (SVNS) algorithms use a combination of heuristics to solve the (team) orien-
teering problem (TOP). The obtained results have a similar quality as the results of
the best known heuristics. However, the computational time is reduced significantly.
The SVSN framework clearly outperforms the GLS algorithm and discovers, for 11
problems, routes with a higher score than the best results published so far.
The iterated local search (ILS) metaheuristic solves the team orienteering prob-
lem with time windows (TOPTW) fast and effectively. An Insert Step is applied at
every iteration to improve the current best solution. A Shake Step is implemented in
a specific manner to successfully escape local optima. The heuristic performs very
well on a large set of problems with up to 288 points. For 68 problems with one
route, the average gap with the optimal solution is only 1.8%, and the worst gap is
9.4%. The average computation time is 1.6 s. For 39 problems with a range of three
up to 20 routes, the average gap is 2.1% and the worst gap is 10.0%.
Metaheuristics for Tourist Trip Planning 29

Similar to most metaheuristics, the presented algorithms require accurate param-

eter setting. Instead of determining these parameters based on preliminary testing, it
might be useful to apply a genetic algorithm as an upper level heuristic to determine
the best parameter set. Very promising results were obtained with this technique and
are described in Souffriau et al. [29].
Until now, only one constraint has to be respected in the TOPTW. It is cer-
tainly possible to extend the ILS heuristic to efficiently solve problems with more
constraints, such as in the case of realistic tourist trip design problems (budget
limitations, distance travelled, etc.). Furthermore, the integration of public trans-
portation, introducing time windows on certain arcs, is an interesting research path
to follow.

Appendix

See Tables 5 and 6.

Table 5 New best routes for 11 test problems of Chao et al. [21]
n m Tmax Travel time Score Route
64 1 35:0 34:86 576 1 9 14 20 27 35 42 34 41 33 32 24 31 38 30 22 29 37 44 50 55
59 62 64
64 1 60:0 59:40 1;062 1 3 6 10 15 21 28 36 43 49 54 48 42 35 27 20 26 34 41 33 40 32
39 45 38 31 24 17 12 7 11 16 23 30 22 29 37 44 50 55 59 62 64
64 1 70:0 69:88 1;188 1 2 4 7 12 18 24 17 11 16 23 31 38 30 22 29 37 44 50 55 51 45
39 32 40 33 25 19 26 20 14 10 15 21 27 35 28 36 43 49 54 48
42 34 41 47 53 61 63 64
64 1 75:0 74:71 1;236 1 3 6 10 15 21 27 20 14 19 26 34 42 35 28 36 43 49 54 58 53 47
48 41 33 40 46 39 32 25 18 24 17 12 7 11 16 23 31 38 30 22 29
37 44 50 55 45 51 56 59 62 64
64 1 80:0 79:19 1;284 1 3 6 10 14 19 26 20 15 21 28 36 43 49 54 58 53 48 42 35 27 34
41 33 25 18 13 8 4 7 12 17 11 16 23 30 22 29 37 44 50 55 51 46
39 45 38 31 24 32 40 47 52 57 61 63 64
66 1 35:0 34:24 465 1 29 28 27 26 34 42 50 58 59 60 61 62 63 55 54 46 38 66
66 1 95:0 94:24 1;395 1 30 22 14 13 5 6 7 8 9 17 16 24 25 33 41 49 57 65 64 63 55 54
62 61 60 59 58 50 42 34 26 18 10 2 3 4 12 11 19 27 35 43 51 52
53 45 37 66
66 1 100:0 99:81 1;445 1 21 13 12 11 19 18 10 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 17 25 24 32 33 41 49 48
47 46 54 55 56 57 65 64 63 62 61 60 59 58 50 42 34 26 27 35
43 51 52 53 45 37 66
66 1 105:0 104:92 1;520 1 30 22 14 15 7 6 5 4 3 2 10 18 26 34 42 50 58 59 60 61 62 63
64 65 57 49 41 33 25 17 9 8 16 24 32 40 48 56 55 54 53 52 51
43 35 27 19 11 12 13 21 29 66
66 1 110:0 109:81 1;560 1 30 22 23 15 14 13 12 4 5 6 7 8 9 17 16 24 25 33 32 40 41 49
57 65 64 56 48 47 55 63 62 54 53 61 60 52 51 59 58 50 42 34
26 18 10 2 3 11 19 27 35 43 44 45 66
66 1 125:0 124:92 1;670 1 30 22 14 13 21 20 12 4 5 6 7 8 9 17 16 15 23 24 25 33 32 31
39 40 41 49 48 47 55 56 57 65 64 63 62 54 46 45 53 61 60 52
44 36 35 43 51 59 58 50 42 34 26 18 10 2 3 11 19 27 28 29 66
30 P. Vansteenwegen et al.

Table 6 Results of ILS for TOPTW with m D 3  20

Name n m Tmax ILS Opt GAP (%) CPU (s)
pr01 48 3 1,000 589 657 10:4 0:7
pr02 96 6 1,000 1;165 1;220 4:5 4:1
pr03 144 9 1,000 1;722 1;788 3:7 26:3
pr04 192 12 1,000 2;420 2;477 2:3 43:4
pr05 240 15 1,000 3;297 3;351 1:6 58:4
pr06 288 18 1,000 3;630 3;671 1:1 177:0
pr07 72 5 1,000 910 948 4:0 3:6
pr08 144 10 1,000 1;985 2;006 1:0 22:5
pr09 216 15 1,000 2;732 2;736 0:1 38:8
pr10 288 20 1,000 3;850 3;850 0:0 95:6
Average 2:9 47:1
Worst 10:4 177:0

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