Multi-period Itinerary Optimization for Regional Archaeological Tourism: A Case Study

Abstract Cultural and archaeological tourism is increasingly acknowledged as a catalyst for regional development, particularly in areas beyond mainstream travel circuits. While itinerary planning has attracted academic attention, the optimization of multi-period cultural routes across dispersed archaeological landscapes remains underexplored. This paper proposes a novel bi-objective optimization model—belonging to the class of Vacation Planning Problems and formulated as a variant of the Team Orienteering Problem—for constructing multi-period archaeological itineraries. The model maximizes cultural value and minimizes travel distance, subject to some logistics constraints. A real-world application in Calabria, Italy—a region rich in archaeological heritage but limited in tourism infrastructure—demonstrates the capability of the model to generate efficient, thematically coherent routes. The findings underscore the potential of operations research methods to enhance sustainable tourism planning in marginal cultural landscapes.