GoTour : A Mobile Tourist Guide For Trip Planning

Tourists around the world may face some difficulties during their travels. An application that is installed in a smart cell phone can be helpful for tourists. In this paper, we present a novel tourist guide project (GoTour) that works on the smart phones with Android Operating System. This project is designed for Istanbul city which is one of the most popular touristic cities and Google map supports this city as well. In order to find tourist location and to show tourist on the map GoTour uses GPS and Google Map respectively. All spots in Istanbul with their attributes such as brief description, work hours, open/close area and coordinates are stored in the GoTour database. By using GoTour, tourists are able to view the all spots based on the categories (shopping, restaurants, parks, museums, antiquities, and consulate), make his/her favorite spots list, view weather condition and request a list of available spots regarding to weather condition and current time. Also tourists can see all the nearest spots on the map including museums, restaurants and other points of interest according to their current location. In addition to this, consulate information based on tourist nationality and service information such as police, ambulance…etc. are the others utility functions of GoTour. The most significant feature that distinguishes GoTour from similar applications [1, 2] is ability to suggest a trip plan in a smart way. Because tourists usually have limited time during the trip, they prefer to choose some interest spots. This application suggests a trip plan taking into consideration selected spot categories, weather condition, current location of tourist and current time. The plan starts from tourist’s location and ends at the destination spot. The plan maximizes the number of most popular spots on the plan without violating constraints (e.g., total time of the trip is not more than a specified limit). We achieve this function by developing an algorithm based on Variable Neighborhood Search which is a metaheuristic for solving combinatorial and global optimization problems. If some spots are already visited by the tourist, the tourist can edit spots. Considering this information, system can suggest a new trip plan. Figure 1 depicts the context model of the proposed solution. The software technologies used to implement the proposed solution include J2ME, SQLlite, and Google Maps API. The mobile application is developed to run on the Android smart phone.GoTour both gathers the features in the various applications in a single application and adds outstanding features. Therefore, we believe that it will be one of the most preferable tourist guide application. We would like to extend this application by including the other touristic cities in the future.Zayed University Research Center and Dubai TR