Museum visitor routing problem with the balancing of concurrent visitors

In the museum visitor routing problem, each visitor has some exhibits of interest. The visiting route requires going through all the locations of the exhibits that he/she wants to visit. Routes need to be scheduled based on certain criteria to avoid congestion and/or prolonged touring time. In this study, museum visitor routing problems (MVRPs) are formulated by mixed integer programming and can be solved as open shop scheduling (OSS) problems. While visitors can be viewed as jobs, exhibits are like machines. Each visitor would view an exhibit for a certain amount of time, which is analogous to the processing time required for each job at a particular machine. The traveling distance from one exhibit to another can be modeled as the setup time at a machine. It is clear that such setup time is sequence dependent which are not considered in OSS problems. Therefore, this kind of routing problem is an extension of OSS problems. Due to the intrinsic complexity of this kind of problems, that is NP-hard, a simulated annealing approach is proposed to solve MVRPs. The computational results show that the proposed approach solves the MVRPS with a reasonable amount of computational time.