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Apparatus, systems and methods for constructing large numbers of travel fares
| Details |
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Inventors: Scipioni, Brian;
Assignee: Manugistic Atlanta, Inc. (Atlanta, GA)
Primary Examiner: Cosimano; Edward R.
Assistant Examiner:
Attorney, Agent or Firm: Hogan & Hartson L.L.P.
According to the present invention, apparatus, systems and methods are provided in which a computer (the "fare construction computer system") is programmed to construct travel fares in conformance with recognized industry rules by building matrices of fare components for travel between one or more cities in such a way that the matrices can be combined in such a way that the travel fares between the two cities are constructed. Each user specifies one or more market areas of responsibility. Each market area consists of one or more cities. According to the user's market area request, the fare construction computer system accesses a database of market points to create a market list of all possible origin-gateway-destination combinations. The fare construction computer system also accesses a database containing fare components. According to one aspect of the invention, the fare construction computer system populates fare component matrices with the appropriate fare components and then combines the fare component matrices using high-speed computer computations. According to an alternative aspect of the invention, the fare construction computer system directly associates fare components by linking combinable fare components using sophisticated data structures. According to the direct association aspect of the invention, fares are constructed by creating all possible combinations of the directly associated fare components. |
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DETAILED DESCRIPTION I.
Overview of the Invention FIG.
1a is a data flow diagram representing a high-level overview of the functions and data involved in constructing fares according to one embodiment of the present invention.
As depicted in FIG.
1a, a fare construction computer system (also referred to herein simply as "the computer") is programmed to receive one or more user-specified designations of origin and destination market areas (1).
User input is accomplished through an interactive, online interface, such as a personal computer having a display monitor and one or more user input devices.
The fare construction system accesses a Travel Points Database (3) containing information about potential travel points and generates a "market list.
" A market list comprises a list of all possible combinations of all cities in the origin area (origin cities) and of all cities in the destination area (destination cities) (2).
For each user's request, for the generated market list, the fare construction system conducts connectivity analysis (4) which is described further below.
Based on the connectivity analysis, the system builds a set of all possible travel fare components that can be used to construct fares for travel between the origin and destination market areas ("Qualifying Fare fare components") (5).
The fare construction system processes in parallel different user market area requests.
The pre-filtering effect of the combination of market list generation and connectivity analysis, with a parallel processing embodiment of the invention allows construction of fares for different markets to proceed in a scalable manner by scaling down the magnitude of the combinatorial problem.
The fare construction system accesses a Fare Data Database (7) which contains fare data for the Qualifying Fare fare components and loads the components into memory (6).
In one embodiment, fare data for the Qualifying Fare fare components is loaded into memory (6) in the form of hash tables and arrays.
It should be understood that the order of functions described herein are illustrative and/or exemplary and are not a limitation of the invention
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