FlightGraph: Visualizing Flight Data for Efficient Flight Selection

Abstract

The aviation industry is probably one of the largest industries worldwide. The Air Transport Action Group reports that three billion passengers were transported globally in 2012. Booking trends analyzed by ITB Berlin and IPK International shows that travel agencies are becoming less important in Western Europe. In 2012, an average of only one in ve customers book their trip through travel agencies, whereas in 2008 an average of one in three trips was booked through travel agencies; the remaining trips were booked using Online Travel Agents. There are many online travel portals; some of the more famous ones are Travelocity, Expedia and Orbitz, and Hipmunk. However we believe that these entire online travel portals have the limitation that they were built with simplistic assumptions about the needs of a user. It is easy to nd the best possible ight if the user is only concerned about one parameter like price, departure date, ight durations etc, however the user is not able to nd the best tradeo between di erent parameters that are important to her unless she is willing to spend signi cant time and e ort. Hipmunk, a recently launched online travel portal, does a better job by providing the ight information in visual form and giving an option that sorts

ights according to a combination of price, ight duration, and number of stopovers. However, if a user is looking for the best tradeo between multiple parameters then she still has to put considerable e ort. This is mainly because of two reasons: the rst is that the xed formula that sorts the ights take away control from the user, and second is that all the information is not visible on a single screen and the user has to scroll up and down many times to consider all the ights. We believe that human needs are too complex for any algorithm to rank the many ights available according to the needs of each user. We believe that the key is give control to the user. This can be done by exploiting the amazing capabilities of the human visual system to visually explore and understand large amounts of data by presenting the travel information in pictorial form on a single screen. In this research project, we plan to investigate and develop an algorithm for providing information to a customer about ii iii di erent ights to his destination. The end product will provide graphical information of di erent routes to the user. Our system will assist user in choosing appropriate ight robustly and e ciently.