Meeting

Inspiration

Creating an interconnected road allowing people who may not meet each other that often a chance to meet in person while minimising the issues that come from that. We know from covid that nothing can replace being in person however there are often major time, monetary and environmental costs. Our project aims to allow businesses who do a large amount of travel to minimise their environmental impact.

What it does

Based on the locations of your offices or where your friends live and which factors you rank as most important (money, time, emissions, proximity to Macdonalds and fairness for all parties) will find the meeting location with the best possible values for each factors.

How we built it

Due to the worldwide nature of this challenge we abstracted all locations to airports as in all international meetings at least 1 office was always going to have to fly. We calculated the as the crow flies distance between the office and airports (only including ones within 500km). We then used ORS to confirm that we could drive to them, adding the driving time to the total time. We then used those airports as well as other logical airports with Djikstra's algorithm to calculate the optimal flight/s to get from each possible start/end node to every possible meeting location. The algorithm optimised for total cost, which included CO2 emmisions and travel time, scaled based on the user's preferences. Using all these routes, we then calculated the score of that meeting location based on the user's importance ranking for each attribute (by using an api to find flight cost, calculating the overall distance/time ect). The entire process was then repeated at a range of possible meeting times to find the time and location with the best score. The graph of all optimal travel routes for the optimal meeting location and time was then output on the map on the web server.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Dealing with so much data to find an overall best within an adequate length of time. Learning Flask Getting APIs to work Collaborating effectively using git and Github with minimal merge conflicts