2020 Articles

Employing waterborne autonomous vehicles for museum visits: a case study in Amsterdam

Rong, Helena H.; Tu, Wei; Duarte, Fábio; Ratti, Carlo

Amsterdam is a culturally rich city attracting millions of tourists. Popular activities in Amsterdam consist of museum visits and boat tours. By strategically combining them, this paper presents an innovative approach using waterborne autonomous vehicles (WAVs) to improve the museum visitation in Amsterdam. Multi-source urban data including I Amsterdam card data and Instagram hashtags are used to reveal museum characteristics such as offline and online popularity of museums and visitation patterns. A multi-objective model is proposed to optimize WAV routes by considering museum characteristics and travel experiences. An experiment in the Amsterdam Central area was conducted to evaluate the viability of employing WAVs. By comparing WAVs with land transportation, the results demonstrate that WAVs can enhance travel experience to cultural destinations. The presented innovative WAVs can be extended to a larger variety of points of interest in cities. These findings provide useful insights on embracing artificial intelligence in urban tourism.