Saving federal travel dollars

Federal employees frequently travel to professional-development conferences and training events. Conference planners often decide on event locations arbitrarily with little regard for travel cost. We developed a method for evaluating travel costs and determining the least expensive conference site from over 261 US cities with government-contracted air-fares. It involves using the relaxation method for solving the noncapacitated shortest-path-network problem and computing interairport distances using latitude and longitude data. A decision support tool called OffSite allows conference planners to assess collective travel costs for attendees arriving from geographically dispersed locations. Event planners input a list of origin cities for conference participants, and OffSite then determines the lowest-cost location. This tool can restrict the search for meeting venues to the origin locations of potential hosts for the conference. In addition, OffSite is flexible enough to allow planners to choose a preferred destination.