Routes and Destinations Map | PacWorld

GIS/Cartography Project

Click to open the map in a new window

Introduction

Airlines Manager: Tycoon is a game developed by Playrion in which players can create and expand their airline network by establishing hubs, purchasing destinations/routes, acquiring aircrafts, scheduling flights, and so on.

In this game, my airline company, PacWorld, has established 12 hubs and over 400 destinations, creating over 1500 routes connecting these destinations throughout its global network. It ranks among the game’s top 2% airlines.

Since the game’s default route and destination maps contain either too much (with simulated aircraft movements along the scheduled routes) or too little information (only the routes and points indicating the destination airports), and are only available to registered players, I decided to create my own interactive map to demonstrate all of my destinations and routes.

Methodology

As I mentioned, the default displays from the game are not up to my satisfactioin, and is difficult to be shared with non-registered players. Hence, after collecting all the necessary information from the game (manual input) and with the help of IATA’s airports dataset (acquired from ArcGIS Hub), I was able to create a database recording information such as destinations and connected hubs (since the game generates routes only in the hub-spokes model), necessary information about the airports, and their geocoding data for visualization purposes.

Examples: In-game displays of the routes network (left: web app; right: iOS mobile app).

Inspiration

As an aviation geek of some sort, I frequent many websites with air travel information. Among all of these, my favourite website for flight data is flightconnections.com. The high degree of interactivity on the website is fascinating, offering a variety of interactive options between features, allowing users to explore flight information in various forms.

I understand the high volume of codes and datasets required to set up a map like this. Since I have yet to acquire web development skills, I seek alternative options for this project to realize my intention to build an interactive flight network map as close to this as possible.

Examples: Screenshots from flightconnections.com, showing the default overview and filtered view with feature interactions.

Visualizations

Great Circle Mapper

I first used Great Circle Mapper to visualize my routes. This tool is great for demonstrating simple flight routes with a few customizable visualization and label options, and is connected to many aviation databases to allow users to explore specific airports and examine information for specified routes between airport pairs.

However, this website can only generate static images, and given the complexity of my network, the visualization is not optimal since it restricts the output image size while displaying all the input data despite the size of the dataset.

Examples: Great Circle Mapper. Optimal for simple routes or airports display.

Mapbox Studio & geojson.io

Then, I turned to Mapbox Studio, in hopes to create a more dynamic and interactive display of my route network. Mapbox’s geojson.io was very helpful with converting raw .csv files into GeoJSON files with georeferences, and Mapbox Studio was very hands-on with data visualization.

While I appreciate the interactive 3D globe base map and the aesthetic UI/UX of Mapbox Studio, the platform has some restrictions when it comes to customizing symbologies, especially with generating symbol classes and generating and displaying geodesic/great circle lines between points (which is critical for displaying such features on a 3D globe). Additionally, since the platform mainly focuses on creating and sharing map styles and web integrative functions, the interactivity is also limited to map display and layer information (in contrast to specific feature information), which is far from what I initially expected (interactivity with layers and features).

Example: map display made in Mapbox Studio (line features generated by geojson.io; unsuccessul in showing lines acorss the 180º line).

ArcGIS

As a GIS student, I eventually turned to ArcGIS and the series of professional tools it provides for creating and managing web maps.

After generating all the necessary layers (destination points and route lines, with the help of ArcGIS Pro’s powerful geoprocessing tools) and configuring feature attributes on the desktop app, I uploaded the map to ArcGIS Online for additional editing to make the features more compatible with web displays.

ArcGIS Online offers many solutions for web map applications, and I first tried ArcGIS Instant Apps for a quick configuration of web map apps. ArcGIS Instant Apps allows more customization of map interactivity than Mapbox Studio: an interactive legend that allows viewers to filter map views by layer/feature class; interactivity options that can enable interactive, viewer-modifiable map views; and a customizable search function that works with all the map features and feature attributes.

But I didn’t stop there. While making this web app, I came across a platform I wasn’t quite familiar with: ArcGIS Experience Builder. Designed to configure an immersive web experience centring web maps, this platform allows more user-defined rules to be set up for the web view and feature interactions, such as the selection of widgets that can connect to map data and site functions, style and view configurations that empower aesthetic displays across different devices (configurable web, tablet & mobile views), and action rules that can enable actions on layers and features on triggers (feature selection, map view changes, etc.), which allowed me to establish a more clean and direct view for any and all of my routes and destinations.

Example: web map application made in ArcGIS Instant Apps.

Example: web map configurations on ArcGIS Experience Builder: interaction by trigger, object style & display and cross-platform supports.

Sample functions

Destination information, and filtered view of routes and connected hubs.

Hub airport information, and filtered view of routes (multi-layer/feature actions on trigger).

Route information, and zoomed-in, filtered view of selected route.

Search function that allows search suggestions (left), look up by attributes, and view effect on results (right).

Seperate list views of hubs and destinations.

Supports of feature and map view interactions on trigger actions and widgets.

Limitations

Because I chose to seek options that provide ready-to-use solutions, the final implementation of this project does not yet quite satisfy my expectation to allow full interactivity within the map features. Although I have enjoyed using all the platforms and services in the making, each of these solutions comes with its own perks and limitations.

I will give a B to the final product. Although with the help of ArcGIS Experience Builder, I was able to build a web map with most of my intended functions, some remained unrealized due to the restriction of the platform. For example, on selecting a destination, the map generates a filtered view of only the selected feature and routes that connect to it, while all hubs remain on display regardless of the connectivity to the selected feature, for the action rules cannot be written on an object-specific basis.

Seeing the difference between what I initially expected and what can be done with these ready-to-use solutions, I feel like this can be an inspirational moment for me to start picking up advanced web development (maybe I don’t even have to pay for this website anymore, yay).

If you have any comments or inquiries regarding this project, please don’t hesitate to reach out! Contact me

Data Source

[1] “World Airports” by Esri Deutschland Content. From ArcGIS Hub. https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/esri-de-content::world-airports/about. Accessed on 30 September 2024.

[2] “Light Grey Base Map” by Esri. From ArcGIS Hub. https://basemaps.arcgis.com/arcgis/rest/services/World_Basemap_v2/VectorTileServer. Accessed on 30 September 2024.