# A Novel Application Based on a Heuristic Approach for Planning Itineraries of One-Day Tourist
## 2 The One-Day Tourist Itinerary Planning Problem  
The one-day tourist, having reached a stage of his journey through the airplane, train, car or cruise ship etc., wonders how to spend at best his/her time in the city in a short time period (e.g., one day). Due to the limited time, it is therefore necessary to pay attention to the organization of the visits and excursions. The tourist can opt for a tour pre-organized by the operator or he/she can plan it on his/her own. In the first case, one of the advantages concerns the mere observation of the predefined roadmap to visit the city, without any worries. This case, on the other hand, does not always satisfy the personal interests of the individual tourist who must follow the visiting group and, in addition, can not personally manage the route and the stops. In the second case, however, the tourist has more freedom of choice but he/she must plan independently the trip in a city and respect the departure times that are mandatory. Instead of relying on the tours organized by the company, sometimes with unsatisfactory results, the tourist by use only a smartphone can select the preferred attractions. Today, there are numerous online travel planning systems that allow to automatically generate a selection and routing plan to visit PoIs that suit the tourist's personal interests [42]. These systems implement various functionalities that aim to satisfy different profiles of tourist interest [43; 44]. Therefore, considering a tourist discovering the city, in addition to walking through its most famous streets, he/she wants to head, for example, to a restaurant near an attraction to have lunch and taste the typical dishes of the place, and then resume the tour and return back. For instance, by simply accessing an app from the smartphone, he/she can set the time available to carry out the tour from a starting point to a restaurant and the time to return back. The visiting times must also include the stop times for activities such as take photos in front of a monument, go shopping, visit a museum and so on. The tourist can also select the preferred PoIs to be visited on the first part of the day, i.e., in the outward trip, and on the second part of the day, i.e., in the return trip, respectively. In addition, the tourist can also indicate the PoIs that are less important and that can be deleted by the roundtrip in case of time unavailability. Then, let us describe an example in order to present the addressed problem. Firstly, the following assumptions are made:  
* the tourist is an active user who wants to interact with the application in order to customize the daily roundtrip;
* the PoIs of the city are initialized by the application;
* the tourist indicates the starting and destination PoIs, the travel modes and time preferences as well as the PoIs to be visited with high and secondary priority, in the first and second part of the day, respectively. Let us consider the case of a cruise tourist who wants to visit the city in one day, without loss of generality. When arriving at the port, the tourist needs to have a plan for the daily tour. In particular, he/she needs to decide which PoIs to visit based on the available time and in which order, also making a priority list to be sure to visit the most important ones. There can be also the necessity to specify which PoIs to be visited in the first part of the day, that is usually lightful and more appropriate to visit outdoor spaces like parks, before to have a lunch, usually in a typical restaurant. The tour for the second part of the day, starts after lunch allowing to complete the city visit going towards the final destination point, i.e., the port. Of course, an application is needed to help the tourist at planning the less time consuming roundtrip, respecting the preferences. In our scenario, the application initializes the PoIs network and shows to the user the map of the city PoIs with related information, including traveling times among each PoI couple based on transport means.