Building Software Agents for Planning, Monitoring, and Optimizing Travel

Planning and executing a trip requires assembling a wide variety of interacting information from a large number of sources, including information on flight schedules and prices, hotel locations and reviews, ground transportation options, weather conditions, airport delays, flight cancellations, etc. Much of this information is now available on the Internet and it can be used to enable travelers to better plan and execute their trips. This paper describes the use of software agents for extracting, integrating and mining online data sources to improve the ability to plan, monitor, and optimize travel. These agents can dynamically extract data from online travel sources, integrate this data to support interactive travel planning, continuously monitor all aspects of a trip to ensure a trip goes smoothly, and exploit data mining to make predictions that can either save a traveler money or improve the likelihood of a successful trip.