A novel travel route planning method based on an ant colony optimization algorithm

Abstract

Abstract As people’s living standards improve, tourism has become an important way for people to spend their time on leisure and entertainment. The growing number of tourists in recent years has given rise to the creation of tourism-related ancillary services. Travelers need to choose a travel route that suits their needs and expectations and do it in a way that does not cause a waste of time, whether it is an emerging self-driving tour or a traditional tour group. Therefore, the optimization of tourist routes is of great significance to the majority of tourists. Given the planning requirements of tourist attractions in the post-epidemic era, an ant colony-based optimization algorithm is proposed to resolve the planning problem of optimal tourist routes. An optimized pheromone update strategy is also proposed based on the basic ant colony optimization algorithm. The optimized ant colony algorithm tries to balance two conflicting concepts, namely, flows into tourist attractions and the carrying capacity of destinations. To analyze the performance of the proposed optimization algorithm, the effects of different optimization algorithms on the route planning of tourist attractions were compared in the experiment, and the acceleration ratio of the optimized ant colony algorithm was tested using the graphics processing unit parallel computing program. The results show that the proposed algorithm provides certain advantages and has certain potential in parallel computing. To sum up, this study provides a better scientific basis for optimal tourist route planning and has a good reference value.