Marketplace location decision making and tourism route planning

This research addresses the problem of planning tourism routes and finding appropriate shopping (market place) locations for agricultural product transportation. Generally, tourists visit popular tourism attractions; and generally, unpopular tourism attractions do not stimulate the economy, trade, or local income. Popular tourism attractions that are located far away from each other require the transportation of local products, and tourists must make decisions as to which locations to visit when planning their vacation. Planning a tourism route while balancing tourism attractions and shopping markets is important for the economic stimulation of tourism. This work presents a problem-solving method for tourism route-planning for a particular case study in Chiang Rai province, Thailand, using the Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) method. Six main destruction and five repair cycles in the ALNS method were applied to solve the tourism route design problem and to find the best solution so that tourists can visit all of the main attractions. We found that 13 tourism routes provide the shortest travel distance for each travel route. The total distance traveled was 2538.02 km for all routes. To balance the tourism on all routes, the popular and less popular tourism attractions were combined. For all routes, the shopping market location is the best place for tourism products to be sold and where tourist relaxation occurs. The results from ALNS were compared with the results from those obtained by the exact Lingo program V11. The ALNS algorithm results were not significantly different from the Lingo results. For the computational results for all examined cases, the ALNS algorithm was shown to be competitive, with short processing times given the sizes of the problems. For the traveling distance, the ALNS result significantly differs from the exact method by approximately 1.12%, and had a better effect than the exact method by approximately 99% in terms of processing time. Therefore, the proposed methodology provides an effective and high-quality solution for tourism route planning.