PleasantTourFinder : an application to find the most pleasant tour from a given location

Details

Supervisors

Schaus, Pierre

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil en informatique

Abstract

When you are in an unknown region, it happens that you would like to take a walk that comes back to your starting location (e.g. where you left your car). Because you don't know the region, it is difficult to find a beautiful and pleasant tour of the good distance. Moreover, web and mobile applications like Google Maps are mainly based on the shortest or the fastest path and thus fail at providing easily routes that are pleasant. The goal of this master thesis is to create an user-friendly application allowing everybody to search for a pleasant tour corresponding to his own preferences. We divide the problematic of finding the most pleasant tour in two distinct sub-problems. First, we define the routing optimization problem and we solve it using Constraint Programming and Large Neighborhood Search techniques. Second, we tackle the assessment of a pleasant value for each road segment by using cartographic data and the preferences of the user. Cartographic data we use are based on the data from OpenStreetMap (OSM) on which we compute characteristics about roads and their environments. Finally, we implement all needed components resulting in a fully functional web application that allows user to search for a pleasant tour. Experimentations validate some expectations but also point out some critical parts that can be improved in a further work.