Applied Soft Computing (Elsevier Science) - https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/applied-soft-computing/about/call-for-papers

Special Issue on "Tourist Trip Planning: Algorithmic Foundations" (https://tinyurl.com/4k365nm2)

- Call for Papers -

The advancement of ICTs has had a profound effect on all facets of travel and tourism industries. Among others, intelligent systems which facilitate tourists in planning their trip either ahead or while at the tourist destination have proliferated in the recent years.

Trip planning entails a particularly complex process which involves several aspects like: selecting the city or region(s) to visit; making travel arrangements in order to get at the destination and familiarizing with public transit networks to move around while being there; identifying conveniently situated and value-for-money tourist and hospitality services (lodging, food and beverage, nightlife, fun parks, shopping, etc); deciding which attractions to visit and which activities to consider. The above listed trip planning decisions are typically made based on a variety of criteria like personal preferences, time availability, cost, vacation style, spatiotemporal context, etc.

Most often, trip planning problems are computationally expensive. Hence, the development of efficient algorithmic methods is fundamental to build intelligent systems which derive feasible and qualitative trip plans. While trip planning problems have been intensively investigated in the recent years, the algorithm engineering community still seeks intelligent algorithmic solutions to tackle various practical tourist trip requirements.

This Special Issue aims at soliciting the latest findings and highlighting the research frontiers in the area of trip planning algorithms with subjects covering the whole range from theory to applications. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
- New problem formulations for tourist trip planning problems - Computational complexity
- Provably efficient algorithmic techniques or metaheuristics for tourist trip planning problems
- Applied Computational Intelligence and Soft Computing approaches in tourist trip planning
- Urban tourist tour optimization
- Multimodal tour planning
- Scenic tour planning
- Multi-region trip planning
- Hotel selection problems
- Multi-objective trip planning problems
- Trip planning and decision making for self-drive tourists
- Green tourist trip design
- Dynamic tourist tour planning
- Stochastic and/or robust optimization for tourist trip planning
- Vacation package recommender systems
- Next-POI recommender systems
- Group trip recommenders
- Machine learning approaches in trip planning
- Expert & intelligent systems for trip planning
- Tour planning supported by social network analysis
- Big data analysis for trip planning
- Sustainability aspects in tourist trip planning
- Yacht tour planning
- Travel region recommendations
- Application of orienteering and knapsack problems in tourist trip planning
- Scheduling problems in trip planning
- Context-aware trip recommendations
- Preference and context elicitation methods
- Profile modeling and personalized recommendations
- Linked Open Data for trip planning
- Surveys on travel recommender systems
- Surveys on algorithmic approaches on trip planning
- Frameworks, applications and case studies

It is noted that mere applications or simple extensions of existing approaches on orienteering, knapsack or vehicle routing problems will not be considered in this Special Issue.

Important Dates
Paper submission deadline: May 15, 2023
First Review Notifications: June 30, 2023
Revised paper submission deadline: August 15, 2023
Final notification: September 30, 2023

Submission Guidelines
All submissions have to be prepared according to the Guide for Authors as published in the Journal website at https://www.editorialmanager.com/asoc/default2.aspx Authors should select "VSI:Tourist Trip Planning", from the “Choose Article Type” pull-down menu during the submission process. All contributions must not have been previously published or be under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Guest Editors of the Special Issue:
- Prof. Damianos Gavalas, University of the Aegean, Greece, dgavalas@aegean.gr
- Prof. Grammati Pantziou, University of West Attica, Greece, pantziou@uniwa.gr
- Prof. Charalampos Konstantopoulos, University of Piraeus, Greece, konstant@unipi.gr
- Prof. Pieter Vansteenwegen, KU Leuven, Belgium, pieter.vansteenwegen@kuleuven.be