An Eco-Friendly Tourism Trip Planner Driven by Z-Number Uncertainty: Evidence from Baku, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Tashkent, and Istanbul
Authors: Aziz Nuriyev, Sherzod Turaev, Saja Al-Dabet, Mary John, Kanan Qasimzade, Alihuseyn Orujzada, Fatima Alblooshi, Aisha Al Ali
Organizations: BA Programs, Azerbaijan State Oil and Industry University, Baku, Azerbaijan · College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates · Department of Artificial Intelligence, Aqaba University of Technology, Aqaba, Jordan · Academic Support Department, Abu Dhabi Polytechnic, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Deployed tourism trip planners ingest travel times and ratings as exact numbers, although routing services return travel times that vary with the hour of departure and a platform rating may rest on a handful of reviews or on hundreds of thousands. We present an eco-friendly trip planner that represents both quantities as Z-numbers, which pair a fuzzy restriction on a value with a fuzzy reliability on the evidence behind it, and that constructs them directly from routing-service observations at six departure hours and from platform review counts rather than from linguistic elicitation. A hybrid loss combines score, carbon, travel-time, and reliability terms, and an adaptive large neighborhood search returns single-day itineraries through a conversational front end. We compare the planner with a crisp-mean baseline under an identical optimizer in Baku, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Tashkent, and Istanbul, with fifteen points of interest and thirty seeds per city, and we evaluate the selected itineraries on their trip carbon and their total travel time. Pooled over 150 seed-paired runs, the planner lowers trip carbon from 3.24 to 2.61 kg (19.3%, Wilcoxon p = 0.017; city-clustered bootstrap interval 6.4% to 26.7%) and travel time from 123 to 109 minutes per trip (11.5%, p = 2.8e-10; interval 5.0% to 18.2%). The travel-time reductions survive a Holm correction in Baku, Istanbul, and Abu Dhabi; the carbon reduction is significant in Baku and large but uncertain in the dispersed catalogs of Dubai and Abu Dhabi; and neither metric changes in Tashkent. Review counts are estimates of at least 3,000 for every point of interest, so rating reliability does not vary, and with a single baseline, the results establish feasibility and direction rather than a general advantage. Code, routing caches, frozen routing tables, and per-seed results are openly released.
Figures & tables
City
Hotel base
Currency
Budget
UTC
Taxi base
Per km
Per min
Baku
Badamdar Hotel
AZN
150
+4
1.0
2.0
0.1
Dubai
Address Downtown
AED
500
+4
12.0
1.96
0.5
Abu Dhabi
Emirates Palace
AED
500
+4
12.0
1.82
0.5
Tashkent
Hotel Uzbekistan
UZS
750,000
+5
5,000
3,500
500
Istanbul
Four Seasons Sultanahmet
TRY
5,000
+3
27.5
15.0
5.0
Table 1: Per-city configuration. The hotel base is the origin and destination of every itinerary; the budget is the monetary soft constraint in local currency; the three taxi parameters define the linear taxi-cost model.
City
Observations
Cache size
Baku
7,145
17 MB
Dubai
6,206
24 MB
Abu Dhabi
5,708
22 MB
Tashkent
2,325
4 MB
Istanbul
5,026
12 MB
Total
26,410
79 MB
Table 2: Released routing caches: number of cached Routes API observations and file size per city.
City
ZN-Full
B1
Change
p
pHolm
d
Baku
2.45±0.51
2.99±0.80
−18.1%∗∗
0.007
0.0498
−0.51
Tashkent
2.62±0.53
2.66±0.69
−1.4%
0.935
1.000
−0.04
Istanbul
0.80±0.60
0.81±0.67
−1.1%
0.854
1.000
−0.01
Dubai
3.93±1.67
5.06±2.68
−22.4%
0.241
0.964
−0.31
Abu Dhabi
3.27±2.21
4.67±2.66
−30.0%
0.129
0.647
−0.37
Table 3: Trip carbon footprint (kg of CO 2 ), mean ± standard deviation over thirty seeds. Change is the relative change of the ZN-Full mean against the B1 mean; p is the two-sided seed-paired Wilcoxon test; pHolm is adjusted over the ten per-city tests of Tables 3 and 4 ; d is Cohen’s d for the paired differences. ∗∗ significant after the Holm correction.
City
ZN-Full
B1
Change
p
pHolm
d
Baku
125.5±10.6
140.6±10.7
−10.7%∗∗
1.8×10−5
1.8×10−4
−1.16
Tashkent
84.5±5.8
84.0±7.5
+0.6%
0.773
1.000
+0.05
Istanbul
98.3±16.9
115.9±25.1
−15.2%∗∗
0.001
0.010
−0.69
Dubai
143.6±28.8
153.7±25.2
−6.6%
0.080
0.482
−0.28
Abu Dhabi
92.4±28.8
120.9±20.5
−23.5%∗∗
2.4×10−5
2.1×10−4
−0.89
Table 4: Total travel time per trip (minutes), mean ± standard deviation over thirty seeds; columns as in Table 3 .
Figure 1: Trip carbon footprint per city for the crisp-mean baseline (B1) and the Z-number planner (ZN-Full): mean and one standard deviation over thirty seeds, with the relative change and the two-sided seed-paired Wilcoxon p -value.
Metric
ZN-Full
B1
Change
p
Cluster 95%
Trip carbon (kg CO 2 )
2.61±1.66
3.24±2.33
−19.3%
0.017
[−26.7%,−6.4%]
Travel time (min per trip)
108.9±30.0
123.0±30.5
−11.5%
2.8×10−10
[−18.2%,−5.0%]
POIs per plan
6.06
6.24
Carbon per visited POI (kg)
0.43
0.52
Travel minutes by car
47.0%
45.0%
Travel minutes on foot
26.6%
20.6%
Table 5: Pooled analysis over five cities and thirty seeds ( n=150 pairs). p is the two-sided Wilcoxon test over the pooled pairs; the cluster interval resamples the five cities (10,000 draws) and is given for the relative change of the mean. Mode shares are shares of total travel minutes.
Figure 2: Paired differences, ZN-Full minus B1, for (a) trip carbon and (b) travel time per trip. Circles are per-city mean differences over thirty seeds with 95% t -intervals; squares are the pooled mean difference with a 95% city-clustered bootstrap interval. Intervals that exclude zero on the favorable side are drawn in blue.
Travel planning is a demanding stress test for tool-using LLM agents: a usable itinerary is a single artifact that must be right along many axes at once - every flight, hotel, and attraction must exist and be bookable, the days must be physically traversable, the total must clear a budget, and the plan must serve a traveler whose needs are only partly stated. Existing agent benchmarks reward these properties one at a time and grade the final output with soft or LLM-judged rubrics, which cannot certify that a returned plan is executable and are neither reproducible nor auditable. We introduce TREK (Travel Reasoning and Evaluation Kit), a benchmark for feasible itinerary synthesis: producing a single plan that is jointly constraint-correct, hallucination-free, spatio-temporally executable, budget-valid, and responsive to the traveler's unstated persona needs. TREK comprises 800 multi-constraint tasks - 533 feasible and 267 provably infeasible with typed route/entity/budget causes - over a synthetic, internally consistent knowledge base of 212,530 records across 375 cities and 13 personas, served through a production-style tool sandbox of validated RESTful APIs. Every task is scored by a fully deterministic, rule-based evaluator with no LLM judge and ships a human-verified gold reference that scores a perfect 1.0 under that same evaluator, so the ceiling is demonstrably achievable and every remaining gap is an agent limitation rather than scorer strictness. Evaluating 15 LLM agents across nine constraint dimensions, we find that even the strongest (GPT-5.6) produces a fully-feasible plan on only 46.2% of solvable tasks, with a median of 6.6% and a floor of 0.0%; satisfying travelers' unstated needs emerges as the universal bottleneck, unsolved even at the frontier. We release the dataset, tool sandbox, deterministic evaluator, and agent code as a fully reproducible benchmark.
Jinhu Qi, Wentao Zhang, Siu Man Ng +4
The Chinese University of Hong Kong Hong Kong, China · Macao Polytechnic University Macau, China
Travel-planning agents generate itineraries that may become infeasible after acceptance because of flight cancellations, hotel unavailability, or attraction closures. Revising these itineraries involves full replanning, classical plan repair, and LLM-based travel-agent revision, whose differing task formulations and evaluation protocols hinder comparison. We conduct a systematic empirical study using two TREK-derived benchmark sets: 500 single-disruption cases, including feasible and infeasible instances, and 200 feasible simultaneous compound-disruption cases. We compare LLM-Z3 full replanning, IPyHOPPER hierarchical repair, and an iTIMO local-revision adapter across effectiveness, plan stability, and computational cost. LLM-Z3 with Gemini achieved the highest observed compound-disruption success. IPyHOPPER nearly matched that configuration's single-disruption overall success, while preserving substantially more of the accepted itinerary on successful repairs. Successful hierarchical and local repairs made fewer edits and retained more accepted commitments than full replanning. Computational profiles differed: IPyHOPPER used no LLM inference, the evaluated LLM-Z3 adapter used compact one-call inference, and the iTIMO adapter consumed substantially more tokens. The study provides practical guidelines for balancing feasibility recovery, commitment preservation, and computational cost within evaluated settings.
Xiaofei Yuan, Yan Zhang, Shaobo Qiao +7
Euler AI · University of New South Wales · University of Sydney +1
Generating personalized trip itineraries is a complex planning task and involves a tension between hard combinatorial feasibility and soft latent desirability. Classical optimization enforces constraints but fails to capture subjective traveler preferences. While learning-based approaches model preferences, they cannot guarantee feasibility. Mobile deployment imposes additional resource constraints on both. To address this, we propose Plan, Learn, Adapt (PLA), a three-stage framework for personalized on-device itinerary generation. The Plan stage builds a heterogeneous ensemble of lightweight planners that produces structurally diverse feasible candidates. From pairwise itinerary comparisons, Learn fits a compact Bradley-Terry reward model that captures emergent schedule properties such as pacing, geographic coherence, and day balance, which per-POI signals miss. Finally, Adapt applies feasibility-preserving local refinement within a device-aware compute budget; every intermediate state is feasible by construction. On 2,519 pairwise human comparisons across more than 100 U.S. cities, the reward-guided ensemble achieves a 67.8% win rate, 11.2 percentage points above the best single planner, with 100% feasibility. Three frontier LLMs, GPT-5, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro, achieve 0% feasibility under the same constraints. The reward model generalizes across held-out cities, with a 67.6% mean leave-one-city-out accuracy. In production deployment within FlyEnJoy, PLA increased itinerary completion rates by 91%, with 109.9 ms average on-device latency.
Himel Dev, Tanmoy Sen, Madhusudan Basak +1
Tech LLC · University of Virginia · University of Massachusetts Amherst