Building real-time travel itineraries using ‘off-the-shelf’ data from the web

Abstract

Existing travel related systems and commonly used websites have some major limitations which cause efforts to be made by the traveler before going out on vacation. Some of these sites allow users to write their personal experiences about visited places but don’t produce a proper itinerary, and those which do, focus only on minimizing the travel time between POIs ignoring other important factors like POI ratings, traffic conditions, etc. Our work focuses on Building Real-Time Travel Itineraries using ‘off-the-shelf’ data from the Web. The proposed solution solves the existing limitations by using an optimization algorithm, which produces a real-time itinerary after optimizing various important factors like travel time between POIs, traffic conditions, ratings of POIs, to enhance the traveler’s experience in a city. Out of the several optimization approaches available, an algorithm was finalized after comparison of performance and accuracy between the approaches. Best results were obtained in case of a dynamic programming based approach, which optimized both accuracy and performance.