Trip planning route optimization with operating hour and duration of stay constraints

This paper proposes an offline approach to generating an optimal vacation routing plan to maximize the number of places to visit during the vacation duration. A traveling salesman problem algorithm results in a plan with the shortest path of travel given a number of stops. This solution is not suitable as a travel planner needs to take into account the operating hours and duration of stay at each stop to create a daily plan. The proposed approach will calculate the time of arrival and minimum time of stay to determine if exceeds the operating hours of the stop. The most important criteria of this system is the need to calculate the time of travel from each location. This is done using two methods, 1) using the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of places to calculate the straight-line distance and subsequently time between them, and 2) by constructing a look-up table consisting of the travel distance and travel time between places using the Google Maps Directions API. The simulation results show that the total traveling time of the proposed system is within 15 minutes to online results which is optimized using data from the Google Maps Directions API while being able to satisfy both operating hours and duration of stay constraints.