Integrated planning of tourism investment and transportation network design

The development of a viable and sustainable tourism industry requires wise strategic planning of investments in tourism sites and the supporting transportation infrastructure. In view of the interactive relationship between transportation and the tourism industry, this paper proposes an integrated modeling framework to address tourism planning and transportation network design simultaneously. A bilevel optimization model was proposed to decide the optimal locations for tourism investment and highway capacity expansion. The upper-level problem minimized the total system cost while the lower-level model determined user equilibrium flow of tourist and nontourist road users under traffic congestion. A customized solution approach based on relaxation, reformulation, and approximation was developed. The proposed methodology was applied to an empirical case study for Heilongjiang Province, China, to show implications of the optimal strategies for tourism planning.