Efficient itinerary planning with category constraints

We propose a more realistic approach to trip planning for tourist applications by adding category information to points of interest (POIs). This makes it easier for tourists to formulate their preferences by stating constraints on categories rather than individual POIs. However, solving this problem is not just a matter of extending existing algorithms. In our approach we exploit the fact that POIs are usually not evenly distributed but tend to appear in clusters. We develop a group of efficient algorithms based on clustering with guaranteed theoretical bounds. We also evaluate our algorithms experimentally, using real-world data sets, showing that in practice the results are better than the theoretical guarantees and very close to the optimal solution.