*Article* **A Novel Application Based on a Heuristic Approach for Planning Itineraries of One-Day Tourist**

**Agostino Marcello Mangini †, Michele Roccotelli \*,† and Alessandro Rinaldi †**

> Department of Electric and Information Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Politecnico di Bari, Via Orabona 4, 70126 Bari, Italy; agostinomarcello.mangini@poliba.it (A.M.M.); alessandro.rinaldi@poliba.it (A.R.)

**\*** Correspondence: michele.roccotelli@poliba.it

† These authors contributed equally to this work.

**Abstract:** Technological innovations have revolutionized the lifestyle of the society and led to the development of advanced and intelligent cities. Smart city has recently become synonymous of a city characterized by an intelligent and extensive use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in order to allow efficient use of information. In this context, this paper proposes a new approach to optimize the planning of itineraries for one-day tourist. More in detail, an optimization approach based on Graph theory and multi-algorithms is provided to determine the optimal tourist itinerary. The aim is to minimize the travel times taking into account the tourist preferences. An Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem is introduced to find the optimal outward and return paths of the touristic itinerary and a multi-algorithms strategy is used to maximize the number of attractions (PoIs) to be visited in the paths. Finally, a case study focusing on cruise tourist in the city of Bari, demonstrates the efficiency of the approach and the user interaction in the determination of the itinerary.

**Keywords:** itinerary planning; smart tourism; graph theory; heuristic approach
