Update: With the results of the competition now available, this project won in New Zealand, then with with one other school went on to enter the international competition and win Honorable Mention (2017017).
Meeting Hall was our submission to the International Mathematics Modelling Challenge. Hosting international meetings to further business or scientific efforts has become common in our increasingly globalized world. This means that individuals from all corners of the world are brought together to do intellectually demanding work as a team. When individuals travel long distances through multiple time zones, they experience a physiological condition known as jet lag. This is defined as the feeling of tiredness or confusion that air travellers suffer when the destination has a different time to the source location. As these meetings can be relatively short, minimising this jet lag is essential to maximising the overall productivity of the meeting. Therefore, a location needs to be chosen for each individual meeting that reduces the total amount of jet lag experienced by the group.
This is a code implementation of the algorithms we built as an answer to this problem. We have focused on making our algorithm as general as possible, and have attempted to rely as little as possible on external data sources (such as air routes) as the large amount of data we require on such things makes requesting data from an external site impractical for a live solution.
To get started, click on the locations where you have people (or type them into the search box below!), and then click “Calculate Best Meeting Place”. The tool will then mark places on the map (as well as listing them below) where it thinks a good meeting point would be. The heat map that appears shows the density of locations that it considered around the world, and the marker with the "M" label shows the geographic midpoint between the points set.
You can view the source code for our submission at our github page, as well as the original data source files and scripts used to convert the data to a useable form.
This tool works best on the latest version of Google Chrome, however the application MAY work on other browsers. This tool does not work on Internet Explorer or mobile devices.