Multi-objective heritage tourism route planning: balancing heritage protection, tourist experience, and rural development

Chinese traditional villages integrate material, social, and cultural heritage, while tourism routes play a crucial role in connecting dispersed heritage resources and shaping visitor experiences. However, existing route-planning studies mainly emphasize travel efficiency or core attractions, with limited consideration of the balance between heritage protection, tourist experience, and sustainable rural development. To address this gap, this study uses Shangzhuang and Yuchuan villages as case studies and proposes a multi-objective heritage tourism route planning framework based on tourism spatial attractiveness evaluation and path optimization. Tourism spatial attractiveness is quantified using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), while the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm and a Modified A* Algorithm (MASA) are integrated to generate optimal routes considering path length, experiential quality, and leisure quality. The results show that experiential and leisure qualities significantly influence tourists’ route choices, and the proposed multi-objective routes better satisfy diverse visitor preferences than single-objective routes. The proposed framework demonstrates the potential of multi-objective route planning as a low-intervention approach to coordinating heritage protection, tourist experience, and rural development, providing methodological support for sustainable heritage tourism planning in traditional villages.