Tourism and Heritage Routes Including Visitants Profile Adaptation and Context Awareness

The project TheRoute (Tourism and Heritage Routes including Ambient Intelligence with Visitants' Profile Adaptation and Context Awareness) aim is to conduct studies, research and experimentation around the challenge of automatic generation of routes for visitors. The suggested routes fit the profile of visitors and groups of visitors, including aspects like emotion/mood/personality, and aware of the context (e.g. weather, security). The focus region is north of Portugal, developed around a location (urban or rural) or path (e.g. Portuguese Santiago Route or Douro) or around a theme (e.g. musician, writer). Points of Interest (POI) will be modeled. Also, the system is able to use different platforms for the tourist (desktop, notebook, tablet, Smartphone). TheRoute has been developed considering the notion of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and Context Awareness. It consists of a context-aware touristic recommendation system which can suggest a series of locations to a user based on their personality, preferences, and location. This paper focuses on the proposed route generation processes, including examples of the overall resulting behavior. We discuss two proposed algorithms (an iterative branch-and-bound based process & sequential addition of the nearest feasible sub-route) for route generation, considering contextual model designing based on user's psychology, and point of interest and availability. The route generation tests that were performed included some of the most influential Porto points of interest.