Spatial Pattern Of Tourism Destination Circle In China: An ABS Analysis

Tourism Destination Circle (TDC) is the output of regional tourism cooperation. The research of TDC formulation mechanism and spatial pattern will help to optimize the allocation of tourism resources and promote the level of tourism development. With the warming of regional tourism cooperation, the research of TDC becomes a hot spot of Tourism Geography. Although there is a common view of the definition of TDC, the scale and scope of TDC is still unclear. By far, there are tens of TDC have been raised, but many of them are overlapping construction. Therefore, it is necessary to build an identification criterion which could be used to make division of the national TDCs. Moreover, analysis indicates that it is hard to use traditional mathematical statistics model to investigate TDC patterns. This paper constructs tourist scenic spot selection and tourist route organization models based on the Agent Based Simulation (ABS) method and makes simulation analysis to China TDC patterns using TDCSS (Tourism Destination Circle Simulation System), which is developed on the basis of Repast and Java programming language.Firstly, the paper points out the problems among current TDC researches and puts forward to use ABS method to study the TDC pattern. Furthermore, the paper makes ABS model designation of TDC on the basis of the tourism environment construction, tourist agent design and the conduction of tourism rules. In addition, the paper constructs travel time model, space allocation model and tourism diminishing marginal utility model while designing tourist agent. The paper uses Greedy Selection method to select tourism scenic spots and Genetic Algorithm method to make optimal tours organization.Secondly, the paper conducts comparative analysis about the current popular simulation platform (Swarm, Star Logo, NetLogo and Repast) and points out that Repast J and Eclipse will be adopted as development environment.Finally, the paper makes three main situation simulations (different time constraint, different traffic condition and different visitor behavior) combining with collected data of regional tourism statistics. What is more is that the paper promotes two TDC identification criterions (tourism domain interaction time and tourism domain interaction index) and identifies seventeen main TDCs. They are Northeast TDC, Liaoning TDC, "Jingjinji" TDC, Shandong Province TDC, Middle China TDC (Henan Province), "Chongqing-Exi" TDC, Sichuan Province TDC, Changjiang Delta TDC, Hunan Province TDC, Yunnan Province TDC, "Beibuwan" TDC, Zhujiang Delta TDC, Southeast Fujian Province TDC, Shanxi Province TDC, Xinjiang TDC, Inner Mongolia TDC, East Gansu Province TDC. In addition, the paper conducts separate analysis of the main TDCs'spatial location, special scale and inner structure and analyzes the ingredients which affect the TDC's spatial structure and scale.