The Route, Tourism and Heritage Routes including Ambient Intelligence with Visitant’s profile adaptation and context awareness,  is a research project that is supported by European Union, Portugal 2020 and Norte 2020 and it was developed in GECAD (ISEP). This project  was created to help every user to discover and explore the city of Porto and the north of Portugal. In general, this project aims to create a Smart System capable to create personalized touristic routes for the user according to their interests, personality and physical limitations.The system was developed with a modular architecture, integrating a Front-End, Decision Support Module, Mobile application and Back-Office. The mobile application guides the user during his visit, having in consideration the context awareness in order to improve the user’s tourist experience .

When the user creates a personal account / profile in the mobile application, a interest survey is presented and after that is attributed a psychologic and interests profile to the user. Related to this survey is used a reduced form of NEO PI R (Revised NEO Personality Inventory) for the creation of the psychologic and interests profile. The algorithm used creates a route having in consideration the time that the user wants to spend to visit the city, his own profile and health issues. In case of the user wants to spend more time visiting a specific Point Of Interest automatically the application will recalculate that schedule in order to finish the journey at the appointed time.

Points of Interest are divided into categories (Nature, Sports, Arts, Architecture, Museums, Commerce, and more) so the user can choose which type of category wants to visit according to the POI’s related. In the system there are already some fixed routes where the user can remove the Points of Interest that don’t want to visit or can create his own route, by adding the POI’s that want to visit. Tourism agents are responsible to introduce the content in the platform where The Route allows the management of the POI’s and their attributes, the POI’s categories that already exist and the management of fixed routes. All the components are detached from each other: each module is independent and communicate through services provided by API-REST. To create a Point of Interest is necessary to indicate:

 – Name / Description / Contacts / Coordinates

 – Presence on Social Media

 – Business Hours

 – Type of Category that belongs

 – Possible restrictions (Age; Medical)

In the future new functionalities will be added such as the addition of hotels and restaurants when multiple days route is created, a virtual pre-visit through the website and a real time tracking of the users’ position in order to deliver the best experience and information to the them.

In addition, it was created a promotional website (insert link) related to this project where the user can get more information and contact the brand if necessary. This promotional website contains actual information about the city like planned strikes, next events, news, information about the Points of Interest and which of them are related to each category, history about the city, alerts and much more. The user can also watch videos about some routes and subscribe the newsletter to know more about the routes.