A Personalized Multimodal Tourist Tour Planner

Tourists become increasingly dependent on mobile city guides to locate tourist services and retrieve information about nearby points of interest (POIs) when visiting unknown destinations. Although several city guides support the provision of personalized tour recommendations to assist tourists visiting the most interesting attractions, existing tour planners only consider walking tours. Herein, we introduce eCOMPASS, a context-aware mobile application which also considers the option of using public transit for moving around. Far beyond than just providing navigational aid, eCOMPASS incorporates multimodality (i.e. time dependency) within its routing logic aiming at deriving near-optimal sequencing of POIs along recommended tours so as to best utilize time available for sightseeing and minimize waiting time at transit stops. Further advancing the state of the art