Virtual Tour Agent

Sri Lanka, as a small tropical island in the Indian Ocean, relies heavily on tourism as one of the major drivers of its economy. In this context, it is extremely important that the tourists who visit Sri Lanka carry with them a life long experience having visited places that would be to their heart's content, which in turn would increase the influx of tourists to the country. Therefore providing a travel plan to fulfil the likes and dislikes of each individual person can be seen as a key issue that needs to be addressed. Tourists normally have to rely on common tour packages that are designed and prepared by travel agents or travellers have to prepare their own tour itinerary which may or may not fulfil their expectations. In the past, there were attempts to solve these problems using database and web technologies but they were not as successful as expected.

The Authors propose that Software Agents technology could be utilized to search, filter and present the necessary information to prepare the travel itinerary. With the necessary data in hand, the Authors will first use an Expert System (ES) to generate the travel itinerary and then the Nearest Neighbour Algorithm (NNA) to find the optimal pathway of scheduled locations. This will provide the users of the prototype Virtual Tour Agent (VTA), a travel plan which would best suit their requirements as it is made according to the traveller’s preferences and requirements. Also, there is an added advantage of being able to modify and customise the travel plans depending on the requirements being at any certain location and being able to continue with an altered travel itinerary to get the maximum results. This enables the traveller in planning his future trips as it would be highlighted to the traveller. The proposed solution also provides other travel support information like weather, transportation and currency information etc. The travellers are provided with the facility of making hotel reservation through web services in real-time and also getting a confirmation Email from the remote (hotel) site through the email engine developed as VTA tries to reduce human involvement. The VTA is implemented on a module basis to have scalable, robust and efficient nature of development. The VTA is developed using J2EE architecture and the Web Component is presented with the Struts Framework. The business logic is implemented using Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) and the database layer is implemented using open-source MySQL. Java Expert System Shell (JESS) has been used to develop the ES of VTA and Java is used for other major developments. In the evaluation, the authors were able to identify solutions to the core problem which is the travel itinerary preparation and other travel problems are met and properly developed to give a proper and accurate answer to the users of the system. The VTA also provides support function (i.e. reservation facilities) for travel planning which makes VTA fully-fledged system overall. The success rate (85%) of the evaluation emphasis on how the prototype is developed in accordance with the real world (tourism industry) and also insists on how the features of the VTA are really accomplished to provide preferences based and customizable travel itinerary.