Coupling Social Media and Agent-Based Modelling: A Novel Approach for Supporting Smart Tourism Planning

ABSTRACT Accounting for tourists’ various needs, preferences, and behavioral patterns is critical for improved smart tourism planning. This paper presents a novel approach that integrates social media and agent-based modelling (ABM) to analyze tourist preference and simulate tourist decision-making. The proposed approach first uses social media to extract knowledge about tourist typologies and tourist preferences. The knowledge, together with that supplemented by questionnaire data, is used for developing an ABM that simulates tourist movements. The approach is applied for the planning of Zaolinwan Park in China. The case study suggests that the incorporation of social media could provide opportunities for an enriched understanding of tourist preference of potential customers and that the modelling of tourist movements can shed light on the planning of infrastructure (e.g., roads and alleys) and service facilities (e.g., food, shopping, and accommodation), which are essential to the functioning of tourism. While this study focuses on tourism planning, the presented method could be applied to other infrastructure and service planning scenarios at community and urban levels.