Embark Now: User Demand Oriented Framework for Multi-day Urban Travel Itinerary Planning
2026-07-12 • Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence
AI summaryⓘ
The authors developed a new method to help people plan multi-day trips in big cities by picking places to visit that fit their interests and schedules. They use smart language models to understand exactly what travelers want, and a special algorithm to quickly create good plans. Tested on real data from Beijing and Tianjin, their approach made better trip plans and worked faster than existing methods. Overall, their system is better at making personalized travel plans within less time.
multi-day itinerary planningPoints of Interest (POIs)user preferencesLarge Language Models (LLMs)Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP)urban travel planningcomputation time efficiencypreference-aware planning
Authors
Rongbo Qi, Yaqi Zhang, Shijun Yan, Xuemeng Liu, Xiangrui Cai, Chunyao Song
Abstract
In large urban areas, planning multi-day travel itineraries is challenging due to the abundance of Points of Interest (POIs), diverse user preferences, and constraints such as opening hours. Effective solutions must dynamically accommodate diverse traveler requirements while optimizing for satisfaction and feasibility within limited computation time. This paper addresses these challenges through introducing an innovative framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) to dynamically capture user requirements with precision and flexibility, and an enhanced Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) algorithm as a well-suited preference-aware planner to generate feasible multi-day itineraries. The effectiveness of our integrated approach is demonstrated through extensive experiments on two real-world urban datasets from Beijing and Tianjin. Our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, improving the average total itinerary score by at least 4.52% and 11.09% across 5,040 user cases with diverse preferences in the two datasets. Furthermore, through end-to-end algorithmic enhancements, it achieves notable average improvements of 17.95% and 26.07% in the computed metrics, while also delivering substantial gains in time efficiency -- realizing average performance increases of 4.64% and 25.55% within shorter computation times compared to suboptimal methods that require multiple iterations. These outcomes underscore our method's superiority in delivering both enhanced itinerary quality and computational efficiency over existing methodologies.