The Travel Route Optimization In Operations Research

The statistic outcome of the National Statistic Bureau indicates that the three major tourism markets, namely inbound travel, outbound travel and domestic travel, have fully made a rapid progress in 2002. The whole revenue of tourism industry numbered 556.6 billion. Confronting the flourishing, prosperous and immense market demands, many tourism enterprises concerned have already provided a great deal of colorful touring itineraries to meet the needs of tourists. In order to design better touring itineraries and to improve present touring itineraries, some travel agencies and scenic spots have undertook lots of practical explores. And the academicians also put forward some instructive advice concerning to this issue. This thesis, based on researches of this field, attempts to make this problem clearer, and moreover discusses the application of Operations Research and Graph Theory in improving touring itineraries.Generally speaking, most of the researches on this issue belong to qualitative analysis on macro-aspect. Based on different specialty background and the questions researched are essentially different. This paper classifies the researching results of the academicians and explores the inner meanings of touring itinerary from the four dimensions of space, time, cost and tourism activity. Based on this, we have carried out a systematic category on touring itinerary. Trying to get the framework on analyzing touring itinerary issue, this thesis also expounds the affecting factors, creating principles and creating procedures of touring itinerary. In this dissertation, we hold that the affecting factors can be generalized as psychological factors, natural factors and cost factors, which is not only summed up on the basis of those previous research, but also closely connects to our dimensional analysis of touring itinerary. Based on the factor analysis, combining the tourism developing principles, we conclude that designing touring itinerary should keep tothe three principles of general layout, market oriented and social oriented, and economical principle. All these principles should impenetrate the whole procedure including four phases, namely conception itinerary designing, operational itinerary designing, itinerary inspection and itinerary improvement.After the thorough analysis of those basic questions, this thesis respectively explains the improvement of touring itinerary of travel agency and that of scenic spots by applying the Operations Research and Graph Theory. Concretely we discuss the application of the shortest path problem, traveling salesman problerm and project management method on the touring itinerary improvement of travel agency. Furthermore, we explore the use of minimum spanning tree problem, overlaid problerm and maximum flow problerm on the touring itinerary improvement of scenic spots. And also enclosed detailed spreadsheet solutions .In conclusion, this thesis is an analysis on the scientific management of tourism enterprises applying the Operations Research and Graph Theory; and also it is a general analysis not only considering the touring itinerary of travel agency, but also taking the touring itinerary of scenic spots into consideration; Meanwhile it is a criterion analysis on how to realize the optimal goal under the supposed resource constraints. Finally it is an analysis combining qualitative analysis to quantitative analysis taking both the requirements of the administrators and the mathematics model into account.