Analyzing and Implementing Pathfinding Algorithms for Flight Route Planning in Java
Ganesh Patil, Suyog Kashid, Abhay Rane, Nakul Sharma · 2025
“Flight route planning is a critical aspect of modern aviation, requiring optimization based on time and cost. This paper compares two pathfinding algorithms-Backtracking and Dijkstra's Algorithm-in the context of flight route optimization. The flight network is modeled as a graph, with cities as nodes and flights as weighted edges. Backtracking, a brute-force approach, explores all possible paths, ensuring accuracy but suffering from high computational costs. In contrast, Dijkstra's Algorithm, a greedy approach, efficiently finds the shortest path using a priority queue. Performance metrics such as execution time, memory usage, scalability, and optimality are analyzed to determine the effectiveness of each algorithm. The results indicate that while Backtracking guarantees an optimal solution, it is impractical for large networks. Dijkstra's Algorithm offers a scalable and efficient solution for real-world flight planning applications.”