Application of Genetic Algorithm in solving Tourist Routing Problem

Normally, tourist will experience dilemma in planning their tour route especially
when they visited foreign country for the first time. Manually mapping the cities and
searching the information on the Internet can be very exhaustive. Besides these,
tourist also faced a dilemma on how to travel across different cities efficiently and at
shortest distance. This can also be known as Tourist Routing Problem (TRP). TRP is
a variance of Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) which can defined by finding the
optimal path to travel from point A to point B by going through the same place not
more than twice at a shortest distance. After completing a thorough comparative
study, the author decided to apply Genetic Algorithm (GA), which is one of the best
heuristic solutions to date in solving TRP. A rapid-prototyping methodology had
been chosen because the author can immediately alter the prototype if there are any
changes in the requirements. An Android mobile application will be utilized as a
platform to test the effectiveness of GA in solving TRP. To support this, simulation
and experiments will be conducted to evaluate the performance and speedup of the
algorithm. Besides focusing on finding the best shortest distance route to travel, this
application will enable tourist to select places to visit according to their preferences
and activities that will be happening at that particular place.