Tourist Spot Recommendation: Recommender System To Promote Tourism in Pakistan

Project Title

Tourist Spot Recommendation: Recommender System To Promote Tourism in Pakistan

Project Area of Specialization Wearables and ImplantableProject Summary

From the last decade, the concept of tourism has beenaugmented tremendously in different world regions. According to “The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO)” from 1950, international tourist arrivals have increased to 1.4 billion per year. Similarly, tourists’ interest has been diversified and more challenging to handle with traditional techniques. Traditional tourism’s management systems are incompetent to fulfill the peculiar needs of tourists. In this regard, the tourism sector realized to come up with an intelligent system that will solve diversified problems of tourists. The inclusion of indestructible technologies in IT with tourist management systems can be beneficial and more productive. Plenty of scientists from various fields, especially computer science, contributed and came with their prominent solutions to handle tourists' problems. However, due to humans' heterogeneous nature, the problems become more challenging and existing contributions are incompetent to manage, handle and produce more accurate results. For example, a person may like to visit rivers in summer while meadows in spring, with time, the preferences and tastes of users’ change. With invent of social networks, big data, IoT’s, and cloud computing provide more granular data about users, which need to be exploited for the aim to understand the behaviour of tourists more elegantly. Several researchers used these technologies and introduced the concept of recommender system in this area, but there are still several issues that need special attention to fulfill tourists’ needs prudently. In summary, we are proposing a recommender system:

• That will recommend unvisited places to user based on their check-in history

• That will provide traffic statistics about the recommended place for the amelioration of individuals’ travel

• That will keep additional information in users’ profiles like visited places etc., because tourists usually enthusiastic to explore new spots and ignore already visited places

• That will provide a precaution message to users before going to a particular spot,

• That will keep track of crowd statistics and provide the details to the concern administration in case of disaster

• That will provide information about the Hotels Occupancy

• That will provide information about road condition

• That will provide information about weather information

• That will suggest unvisited locations to users with few check-ins at a location or less than 18 check-ins.

Project Objectives

In this research project, we have carefully reviewed the highlighted tourism issues tourists face and identified key issues in the literature. We come with solutions to cope with these issues that will facilitate the tourists/users and be beneficial for the policymakers, development experts, and industry leaders to contribute intellectually to the tourism sector. We are also developing a novel model-based recommender system that will perform better than state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy. We have also collected data sets that will be experimented with, aggregated, and tested according to the needs of tourists.

1. Objectives

• To identify issues and challenges in E-Tourism

• To create a dataset of checking the history of all tourism spots in Pakistan

• To develop a novel model-based point of interest recommender system 

• To deploy the proposed system in Tourism Department

Project Implementation Method

The four-layer architecture has been proposed to achieve the goals of our project which consists of Data layer, Processing Layer, Semantic Layer. 

Figure 1: AutoLog Layered Architecture

Data Layer

The data layer is responsible for the collection of raw sensory data from the car sensors i.e. car built-in sensors and car custom sensors. In order to log the events, each sensor needs to detect the external and internal phenomena of the car. Each sensor has its own functionality which can be further used in combination with other sensors to detect more accurate activities. We have classified the car sensors in two categories including car built-in sensors and car custom sensors. 

Processing Layer

Processing layer is responsible for capturing data from the data layer and perform some operations to filter out the meaningful events. Data collected from the data layer is not capable to pass directly to the semantic layer as the data is in raw form which need further preprocessing before storing in database. Processing layer contains an event recognizer module which can be used to recognize the events i.e. simple events and complex events. Simple events are those events which can be recognized directly without passing through classifier such as door on/off, lights on/off, weather information, number of passengers, etc.The event recognition flow chart is depicted in figure 3

Figure 2: Event Recognition Flowchart

Semantic Layer

The semantic layer is responsible for the addition of semantic clue to the architecture by mapping low-level context features into the high-level semantic model such that ontology. The semantic layer is consist of an event database module and ontology module. The events recognized by the processing layer is directly mapped to an event database for the storage purpose. Event ontology can be used for the recommendation and real-time assistant during trips. As the lifestyle of the people is changing with the development in the society resulting in new events, interactions, and needs. 

User Interface Layer

User Interface Layer is the space where interaction between users and the system takes place. For the user interface, Android app will be designed which will be run directly on smartphone or android based in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system. The proposed app will consist of two sub-modules i.e. recommendation module and configuration module. The configuration module will provide the interface to communicate with the vehicle using a Bluetooth connection to the OBD-II device. 

Figure 3: Configuration Module Flowchart

In order to ensure privacy, the configuration module provides an opportunity for the user to turn on/off the sensors/devices for logging the data. The configuration module will also provide the opportunity for the user to adjust the settings for logging the phone activities during driving i.e. phone calls, messages, social interaction, etc.

Benefits of the Project

Benefits:

The significance of the research is to facilitate the tourists and allow the policymakers, industry specialists, and development experts to give special attention to the tourism sector. The developing world, for example, the UN Commission on Trade and Development promotes the importance of tourism to Least Developed Countries; the UN Environment Programmepromotes sustainable tourism, and the UN World Tourism Organization is not only exclusively devoted to tourism but has even created an international foundation to enhance its contribution to development (Sustainable Tourism – Eliminating Poverty, ST-EP). According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, the direct contribution of travel and tourism to Pakistan's GDP in 2016 was US$7.6 billion (PKR 793.0 billion), constituting 2.7% of the total GDP. By 2025, the government predicts tourism will contribute ?. 1 trillion (US$6.2 billion) to the Pakistani economy. If the policymakers give attention to implementing IT in tourism and making reforms in this area, it will further increase its GDP. Our model will provide information about specific places most visited by the tourists at a particular time. Based on that data, the policymakers will be able to make effective decisions. With the help of that data, the industries, infrastructure, and tourism will be boosted further. On the other hand, the tourists will be able to get personalized recommendations, and if they have gone for a tour in unknown regions, then from their social relationships, they will get sophisticated recommendations and make their lives easier.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

Estimated Cost of the Project in Rupees (Table-I to III)

Year:	Recurring (Salary/honoraria and allowances)	Non-Recurring (Equipment, Supplies and Materials)	Total
1st Year:	1880000/-	1090000/-	2970000/-
2nd Year:	1880000/-	35000/-	1915000/-
Sub Total:	3760000/-	1125000	4885000/-
Audit fee @ 2% or Maximum Rs. 20,000/- per year			40000/-
Grand Total			5285000/-

                                 TABLE-II Expenditure on Salaries and Allowances

Post & Scale of Pay	No. of Posts	1st Year	Total
(I) Honoraria -Principal Investigator (@ Rs.50,000/- per month) -Co-Principal Investigator (@ Rs.30,000/- per month)	2 = (1@50000) (1@30000)	960000	960000
(II) Allowances: -Professional/Technical Personnel *(Research Associate) @ Rs.15,000/- to Rs.25000/- per month -Other Personnel	2@ 25000	300000	300000
	1@20000	240000	240000
	1@50000	180000	180000
(III)  Travel within country: (a) For projects involving field  work (b) Participation in conferences within country to present the project results	3	200000	200000
Total:			1880000/-

Note: * Rs.15,000/- if graduated or enrolled in M.Sc/B.S/B.Sc (Hons), Rs. 20,000/- if graduated or enrolled in M.S/M.Sc(Hons)/M.Phil and Rs. 25,000/- and Rs. 25,000/- if enrolled in PhD.

TABLE-III

Expenditure on Equipment, Supplies & Materials

Sr. No.	Item	1st Year	Total
1.	Stationery	20,000	20,000
2.	Literature	10,000	10,000
3.	Contingencies, Postage etc.	20,000	20,000
4.	Report Writing and Publications	10,000	10,000
5.	ProtoType Devlopment	20,000	40,000
Total:		800,000	100,000

*If equipment is available and requires minor repair. Details of repairs along-with invoices may be provided  

Note: * Committed participation from the industry should be mentioned either in cash or in kind. The value must be mentioned in the project budget in Rupees.

Year:

1st Year:

2nd Year:

Sub Total:

Audit fee @ 2% or Maximum Rs. 20,000/- per year

Grand Total

Post & Scale of Pay

(I) Honoraria

-Principal Investigator

(@ Rs.50,000/- per month)

-Co-Principal Investigator

(@ Rs.30,000/- per month)

(II) Allowances:

-Professional/Technical Personnel

*(Research Associate) @ Rs.15,000/- to Rs.25000/- per month

-Other Personnel

(III)  Travel within country:

(a) For projects involving field 
work

(b) Participation in conferences within country to present the project results  

Total:

Sr. No.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Total:

Final Deliverable of the Project HW/SW integrated systemCore Industry TransportationOther IndustriesCore Technology Wearables and ImplantablesOther TechnologiesSustainable Development GoalsRequired Resources

Post & Scale of Pay	No. of Posts	1st Year	Total
(I) Honoraria -Principal Investigator (@ Rs.50,000/- per month) -Co-Principal Investigator (@ Rs.30,000/- per month)	2 = (1@50000) (1@30000)	960000	960000
(II) Allowances: -Professional/Technical Personnel *(Research Associate) @ Rs.15,000/- to Rs.25000/- per month -Other Personnel	2@ 25000	300000	300000
	1@20000	240000	240000
	1@50000	180000	180000
(III)  Travel within country: (a) For projects involving field  work (b) Participation in conferences within country to present the project results	3	200000	200000
Total:			1880000/-