Case Study: Arizona State University helps students find budget travel options with Google for Education and Google Cloud

Arizona State University builds a budget travel app in 36 hours with Google for Education

Arizona State University students faced the challenge of creating a travel app that could efficiently find complex, multi-stop flight itineraries on a tight budget, a computationally intense problem. They developed OdySearch using Google for Education and Google Cloud products, including Google Compute Engine, to automate the search for affordable travel options.

The solution implemented by Google for Education involved using a high-performance Compute Engine virtual machine to run a greedy algorithm for flight searches and later migrating to the scalable App Engine Flexible Environment. This allowed the students to successfully build a functional prototype and a backend system that finds round-trip trans-Atlantic flights for under $850, opening up new travel possibilities for users on a budget.

Arizona State University