Tour Guides Get Guided: Intelligent Coordination of Simultaneous Tours in Exhibition Environments

Christian Meurisch, Lulzim Murati, Rüdiger Eichin, Benedikt Schmidt, Max Mühlhäuser

Abstract: Exhibitions are an important instrument for companies to promote their latest products. During these events, experts (tour guides) guide customers in an exhibition area as part of guided tours, and present them specific topics at dedicated booths. However, occupied booths by other simultaneous guided tours or unexpected (external) events often result in undesired delays and a decreased tour experience. In this paper, we study different intelligent strategies for reacting to unexpected events and dynamically coordinating guided tours supported by ubiquitous technologies. For a pre-study, we deploy our Bluetooth-based tracking system, and conduct participant observations in a large-scale industrial exhibition event to get insights into guided tours and reveal open issues. We implement a realistic discrete event simulation environment to investigate novel strategies to overcome these issues. Our results show that the proposed strategies outperform the baseline strategies by decreasing waiting times while better matching the customers' interests in all scenarios.