ITB Students Created an AI-Based Travel Planner Application
By Adi Permana
Editor Adi Permana
BANDUNG, itb.ac.id—Traveling out of town to a new place can be an appealing choice to spend your time off. Limited vacation time or confusion in deciding where you want to go often becomes a dilemma in planning a trip. This is also worsened by inefficient travel time due to asymmetric routes between your list of destinations.
This issue was successfully resolved by two Institut Teknologi Bandung students who created the Odiga application. Odiga is a travel planning web application that utilizes K-Means clustering, collaborative filtering, and genetic algorithms.
Through this innovation, the team consisted of two Physics Engineering students, Nafi Mulyo Kusumo and Syarifa Khairunnisa, and a student from Sekolah Tinggi Ilmu Komputer Cipta Karya Informatika, Muhammad Rifqi Syatria, won the 1st place in the Compfest 14 2022 competition. This competition was organized by the Faculty of Computer Science Universitas Indonesia, which began at the end of June 2022 and closed with an award night on October 30 last year.
Odiga is equipped with four features. The first feature is trip planning with interactive maps from Mapbox GL JS. Through this feature, users can directly select the places they want to visit on the map. The second feature is artificial intelligence (AI) based time planning. With one click, users can find out the most time-effective schedule based on the place's location and the trip's number of days.
The third feature is AI-based route optimization. Formerly, the order of the locations the app suggests will follow the order the user enters on the web. This suggestion can consume the user's time due to how the path that may not be in the same direction is sorted. With this feature, the order of trips becomes more efficient and users can save more time.
The last feature is a travel attraction recommendation using a collaborative filtering algorithm. When visiting a new place, references to tourist attractions can help tourists maximize their travel experience. Odiga provides recommendations for places along with their ratings and can be added directly to the user's itinerary.
Syarifa said that when they were designing this app, brainstorming became the most critical process. Their ability to apply a design thinking method to find an idea became the winning tip for the Odiga team.
"The first stage of design thinking is to empathize. When determining the idea, try to review it over and over so that the idea is right on target. Even though it is very sophisticated from a technological point of view, it may not be right on target and also nonapplicable in everyday life, thus reducing the selling value. So first, make sure that your idea is right on target," Syarifa concluded.
Reporter: Amalia Wahyu Utami (Engineering Physics, 2020)
Translator: Hanna Daniela Ayu (Aerospace Engineering, 2021)