Time-Aware Multi-Day Tourist Routing for Cappadocia: A Time-Window Orienteering Model with an Opportunity Score for Surfacing Overlooked Attractions
Keywords:
Tourist trip design, Team orienteering problem with time windows, Over-tourism, Visitor dispersal, CappadociaAbstract
Designing a realistic multi-day itinerary for a heritage destination is harder than minimizing travel distance: attractions have opening hours, some experiences are valid only within narrow daily windows, each stop consumes a different amount of time, and the visitor's day is finite. Existing work on Cappadocia derives attraction centres from social-media data and connects them with a plain travelling-salesman tour that ignores time. Executed against real opening hours, that distance-optimal tour arrives at eight attractions after closing, never catches the balloon at sunrise, mistimes all five sunset viewpoints, and spreads across seven days. We instead formulate the problem as a Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (TOPTW) over a real OpenStreetMap road network, with service times, opening hours, a daily budget and destination-specific temporal rules, and produce feasible 2-, 3- and 4-day plans. Attractiveness is grounded in 2025 Wikipedia pageviews cross-checked with official visitor statistics and extended by a documented type prior. An opportunity score rewards low-profile attractions near a popular hub: raising its weight lowers the mean popularity of the visited set from 0.41 to 0.06, raises the share of lesser-known stops from 52% to 100% and reduces driving time, making visitor dispersal an explicit, tunable objective.
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