An object oriented intelligent tourist advisor system

The paper describes the design and development of an expert system for a tourist information center built to recommend a suitable travel schedule that satisfies user input constraints such as time period, budget and preferences and proposes a highly generic knowledge structure to cope with high volatility in tourist information.

Abstract

The paper describes the design and development of an expert system for a tourist information center. The expert system was built to recommend a suitable travel schedule that satisfies user input constraints such as time period, budget and preferences. Tourist center officers need to answer similar queries in their day-to-day work and could be replaced by an intelligent tourist advisor system. There is a lot of tourist information, such as activities and places, which can be stored as similar data structures and can be modeled into an object-oriented knowledge-based system. A highly generic knowledge structure is proposed to generalize the common features and eliminate duplication. The proposed knowledge structure would be flexible enough to cope with high volatility in tourist information such as transportation routes. Object-oriented modeling has been used for the entire development of the proposed intelligent expert system. A case study is presented to demonstrate the benefits of such an approach for an expert system with a repetitive and volatile problem domain. The system was developed using an expert system development environment-Kappa-PC and was migrated to Power Builder. Such migration of the expert system demonstrates how a conventional business decision support system can be integrated with the expert system approach without using an expert system shell. The proposed framework should be applicable to any popular event-driven development environments.