QRT Meeting in the Middle Challlenge

Reimagining business travel: fair, efficient, and low carbon. Our tool finds the optimal host city by analyzing global flight data, balancing CO2 emissions against travel fairness for all attendees.

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Inspiration

Organizing meetings among friends is difficult, but for companies with offices spread across the globe, it is a logistical nightmare. Finding the optimal meeting location that balances carbon emissions, travel fairness, and flight availability is extremely challenging. We were inspired by the need to make international collaboration more sustainable and equitable. Why should some team members always bear the burden of long-haul flights while others never leave their home city? We set out to solve this problem using data-driven optimization.

What it does

Our Meeting Location Optimizer is an intelligent system that finds the optimal location and date for in-person meetings by analyzing:

  • Carbon Emissions: Calculates CO2 footprint for all attendees' round-trip flights
  • Travel Fairness: Ensures no attendees are unfairly burdened with excessive travel times
  • Flight Availability: Uses real OAG flight schedule data to find actual available flights
  • Geographic Constraints: Only considers locations within the attendee region
  • Multi-Day Events: Handles complex availability windows and multi-day meetings

How we built it

  • The initial dashboard prototype were first designed in Figma before the front-end was created using React and styled with Tailwind CSS.
  • The back end predominately uses Python to scrape OAG data and calculate the optimal location based on our devised algorithm.

Challenges we ran into

  • Data Inconsistencies: OAG flight data had missing columns (TOTAL_SEATS often NULL), requiring fallback logic to equipment defaults.

  • Geographic Filtering: Preventing absurd suggestions like "meet in Chicago when everyone is in Asia" required implementing proper geographic containment using centroids and radius filtering.

  • Performance: Evaluating thousands of location × date combinations required optimizing Polars queries and caching airport lookups.

  • Integration: Putting the front-end and back-end together proved to be a challenge since we were under time-pressure to complete the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Sleek Dashboard: We are proud of having created a sleek, engaging and informative dashboard that displays all the information needed onto one single screen whilst maintaining aesthetics.

  • 3D Globe: None of us have ever worked with using 3D models within websites before so being able to learn how to use these models and integrate them so well into our project was really rewarding to see.

What we learned

  • The Art of Visualizing Data: We definitely felt that, through displaying data in different ways and diagrams, you could tell a story and convince the user better. For example, we felt that our globe and our timeline diagrams really helped convey our ideas across much more efficiently and intuitively.

  • Trade-offs in Algorithms: We also learnt that there is no one single right answer when it comes to making decisions like this. We constantly found ourselves having to make decisions to prioritize one factor over another and justifying our thoughts.

What's next for QRT Meeting in the Middle Challenge

  • Real-time Flight Prices - Integrate with airline APIs for live pricing

  • Hotel Recommendations - Suggest accommodations near meeting venue

  • Calendar Integration - Export itineraries to Google Calendar/Outlook

  • Historical Analysis - Track meeting patterns over time to identify improvement opportunities

  • Alternative Transport - Include trains for intra-European routes (lower CO2)

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