Multi-modal trip planner
Each day more than a million people take it to online travel websites to find best available options for them to voyage to their destinations. Today with unlimited options available online and multiple modes of transport, travelling to your desired destination is not a problem anymore, but choosing one of the many options for yourself according to your suitabililty and affordability has become a real brainer. The purpose of this study is to consider users preferences and affordability for a particular trip and develop a prototype trip planner using multi criteria optimization algorithms to provide an easy solution to this problem, by ranking the numerous options available for one to travel to their destinations. The prototype developed during the study provides user a form where they can enter their source, destination and preferences for the trip like (mode of travel they are comfortable with, sleeper or multi axle if they choose bus, sleeper or AC coach if they choose train etc). For some preferenceslike,cost over time or time over cost,user can give a desired weight on a scale of one to ten as well.After user has filled the form, matching batch to the query is extracted from the database, and for each tuple a score is calculated using weighted sum approach and the weight given to various preferences. The ranked tuples were checked manually to see if they are arranged in the best possible order according to the user’s preferences and the results were found to be very promising.
Application prototype : http://mmtp.4rog.in