Collaborative Route Planning of Road Trips in Regional Central Cities of China: An Approach Based on E-CARGO Model

Recently, the road trip in regional central cities has become one of the mainstream travel styles for Chinese tourists. However, existing research fails to plan the road trip route in Chinese regional central cities due to its flexibility, complexity, and long-term characteristic. A collaborative route planning approach for road trips, namely CoRPoRT, is proposed. This approach decomposes the route planning of a road trip into two role-based collaboration subproblems to alleviate the complexity issue. Then, the environments–classes, agents, roles, groups, and objects (E-CARGO) model is innovatively employed to formalize the problems and guide the optimization process for dealing with the long-term characteristic of road trips. Moreover, we identify the complex constraints affecting point of interest selections and propose an efficient solution via the IBM CPLEX solver to handle the flexibility of road trips. Finally, a case study and simulation experiments verify the effectiveness of CoRPoRT. CoRPoRT presents a general problem modeling method and a novel research paradigm for the route planning of road trips.