ABSTUR: An Agent-based Simulator for Tourist Urban Routes

• A novel multi-agent system simulates groups of tourists signing up for routes.
• There is not any other system in the literature with the same purpose.
• Its performance is compared with another system with the same specifications.

There are plenty of expert and intelligent systems related to tourism, either for (1) selecting appropriate paths, (2) recommending routes or travel packages, (3) simulating certain implications in tourism, or (4) virtually immersing tourists. However, to the best of author’s knowledge, none of these works provides a system that simulates how many tourist people sign up for each tourist route considering the features of some routes and tourists. This article presents an Agent-based Simulator (ABS) that covers this gap of the literature and is called Agent-based Simulator for Tourist Urban Routes (ABSTUR). It receives input from a set of routes and certain number of tourists with different types, and provides the number of tourist people signed up for each route after the simulation. ABSTUR has been experienced by assisting a group of tourism experts in designing a set of tourist routes in the historic center of Madrid. In this manner, experts were able to avoid collections of routes with overcrowded or non-profitable routes. ABSTUR has also proven to be efficient by comparing it with another ABS with the same specifications.