Biclustering sustainable local tourism systems by the Tabu search optimization algorithm

Abstract

Tourism is nowadays fully acknowledged as a leading industry contributing to boost the economic development of a country. This growing recognition has led researchers and policy makers to increasingly focus their attention on all those concerns related to optimally detecting, promoting and supporting territorial areas with a high tourist vocation, i.e., Local Tourism Systems. In this work, we propose to apply the biclustering data mining technique to detect Local Tourism Systems. By means of a two-dimensional clustering approach, we pursue the objective of obtaining more in-depth and granular information than conventional clustering algorithms. To this end, we formulate the objective as an optimization problem, and we solve it by means of Tabu-search. The obtained results are very promising and outperform those provided by classic clustering approaches.