A Customized Visiting Route Service under RFID Environment

How to provide a high quality service according to consumer preference becomes a critical issue for amusement park to survive in a rapidly changing environment. To fulfill the need, this research proposes a customized visiting route service that provides tourists what facilities they should visit and in what order. In the studied environment, all regions are covered by Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) readers so that the visiting behavior of a tourist (i.e. visiting location, sequences, and corresponding timestamps) can be collected and stored in a route database. The proposed route recommendation service consists of two major modules. The first module is to discover the frequent Location-Item-Time (LIT) sequential patterns using the proposed sequential pattern mining procedure. In the second module, the route suggestion procedure will filter the LIT sequential patterns under the constraints of intended-visiting time, favorite regions with its related visiting time, and favorite recreation facilities, then select the top-k suggested routes to guide the visitors. To show the feasibility of the proposed route recommendation system, the Tokyo DisneySea in Japan is used as an example. Based on the experimental results, it is clear that the recommended route can not only follow previous tourists' visiting experiences but also satisfy the visitor's customized requirement.