Multi-Agent Mobile Tourism System

Introduction

Nowadays, with the emergence of high-speed wireless networks, various portable devices such as personal digital assistant (PDAs), mobile phones, and other wearable equipment are widely used by people in their daily lives. Context-awareness plays a vital role in enabling smart environments, wearable computing, and wireless computing. This article presents the multi-agent system, which uses mobile technology to offer services in the tourism domain.

Agent-based systems are widely used for mobile and distributed information systems. Agents can also help in preventing the user from being overwhelmed by irrelevant information using personalization methods. This technology provides the integration of information from diverse sources, while personalization provides the filtering technique to deliver the relevant information to the users.

The system gives up-to-date information based on the user’s preferences and other contextual information such as sight location, weather condition, and special functions that are arranged during the visit. The system consists of two types: Web-based and mobile-based. We design the system as client-server architecture, supporting desktop clients as well as mobile clients on a handheld device with appropriate interfaces. However, in this article, we now focus on the mobile-based tourism system. The handheld device or PDA is used for receiving information from a Web server.

In past years a broad spectrum of different Web-based tourism has been established. The acceptance and consequently the competitiveness of a tourism system are mainly determined by the quantity and quality of data it provides. Therefore, most existing tourism systems try to fulfill the tourist’s request (interest) for an extensive data collection (Rumetshofer & Wob, 2005).

Tourism information (e.g., travel schedules, etc.) are distributed, dynamic, and heterogeneous. The users (tourists) may face difficulty using them when planning their trips.

Nowadays, the improvements in wireless communication technologies such as handheld devices to the Internet open up new prospects for e-commerce and e-tourism. Today, new technologies allow more flexible access to information booking services and other tourist support (Belz, Nick, Poslad, & Zipf, 2002). Tourism has been a popular area for mobile information systems. There are a number of obstacles to introducing new technology in tourism. Electronic guidebooks and maps have been a popular application area for mobile technology.

In the near future, a broader range of services will become available to users anywhere, at any time. People can receive their required information by interacting with their PDA from wherever they are. Kanellopoulos and Kotsiantis (2006) stated that the tourism industry makes efforts to implement techniques that can reduce travel cost and improve performance.

A major issue in offering mobile services to nomadic users is the limited display and networking capacity of mobile devices such as wireless application protocol (WAP) phones or PDAs. A possible solution for this is the adaptation of services and contents to the users’ personal interests and their current location. The adaptation of services and contents to personal interests mainly filter the available information. Poslad et al. (2001) described the filtering process as based on a user profile describing the interests, abilities, and characteristics of the user.

Ding, Malaka, and Pfisterer (2002) described multi-agent systems as particularly well suited for mobile information systems, and some systems even allow for resource-aware computations in mobile and distributed environments.

Maw and Naing (2006) described the architecture and design of a multi-agent tourism system (MATS). MATS evaluated the similarity value and mean absolute error (MAE) to give the best recommendation to the user.

The central motivation of this article is to extend MATS suitable for the mobile user in the tourism domain. The objective is to give the user the most relevant and updated information according to the user’s interest.

The next section provides the definitions and a discussion of the system, and reviews literature of some related works. The main focus of the multi-agent mobile tourism system architecture is then described, and the design considerations and future trends are also discussed, before we conclude the article.