An Efficient Heuristic for the Vacation Planning Problem In this paper we define the Vacation Planning Problem (VPP) as an optimization problem whose objective is to find a set of destinations in a specified region, the visiting order of the destinations in the set, and for each destination, a number of days of stay, a proposed hotel area and daily tours, i.e. ordered visits to points of interest, that maximize the satisfaction of the tourist while matching her preferences and respecting her constraints (e.g., the total number of days of stay, daily time budget). To the best of our knowledge, the VPP has not been studied so far in the literature. The problem is NPhard and can be seen as an extension of the Tourist Trip Design Problem and its variants that focuses not only on suggesting personalized tourist routes but also optimal destinations and hotel areas as well as optimal distribution of the days of stay at different destinations, and as a variation of the Orienteering Problem with Hotel Selection. We present a heuristic approach for solving the problem and experimental results proving the efficiency of the approach.

Improvements on Probability Model for Sightseeing Route Recommendation Method Employing Generalized Formulation in terms of Edges This paper proposes an improved formulation of probability model for sightseeing route recommendation method based on a generalized formulation in terms of edges. In sightseeing route recommendation, at least, methods has to predict spots to be visited by a user and a route to travel them. Recommendation process can be modeled as a optimization problem, such as Traveling Salesman Problem or Orienteering Problem. Simulated annealing (SA) is one of the metaheuristics to solve optimization problem, in which problems can be modeled as sampling from a probability model. A method using SA on Edge vectorbased formulation (EV) has been proposed, which has introduced a concept of a real and virtual edge to deal with a noncomplete graph like a real world road map. Using this formulation, EV has generalized both spots and roads passed by a user to edges, then applied SA to its formulated problem. The shortage of EV is that this model deals with the real and virtual edges asymmetrically, which causes decreasing of performance. This paper proposes an improved formulation of the objective function of EV. Experimental result shows that asymmetry treatment actually decreases performance, and proposed formulation gives grater performance than that of original formulation.