Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – For cost/price
Reexamination Certificate
1999-03-19
2001-07-17
Cosimano, Edward R. (Department: 2761)
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
For cost/price
C705S006000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06263323
ABSTRACT:
This invention relates to a process for producing constructed fares.
Airlines publish fares for various markets. A market is a city pair such as NYC-PAR (New York-Paris). For markets involving major cities like the NYC-PAR market, airlines provide published fares, that is, stated prices for travel between the two cities. For markets involving minor cities, however, the airlines rely on a process called fare construction to produce fares that are sometimes called “constructed fares.” Fare construction is particularly used for minor markets involving international travel.
In the NYC-PAR market there may be hundreds of published fares with corresponding rules to combine the fares. However, there are too many markets for airlines to actually publish fares for every single market. For example, for the OME-NCE (Nome, Ak./Nice, France) market, there may not be a published fare because the Nome-Nice market may be too small for airlines to actually publish fares. Nevertheless, the airlines need to be able to offer some price for an OME-NCE ticket. The fare construction process solves this problem by providing a mechanism to “extend” a published fare with add-ons also called arbitraries, in order to derive prices to minor cities. An arbitrary, like a published fare, lists two cities. However, unlike cities in a published fare (which establish a bidirectional market), the cities in an arbitrary are ordered: the first is the gateway (or major) city, and the second is the interior (or minor) city. Constructed fares can be either two-component constructed fares, i.e., one arbitrary combined with one published fare or three-component constructed fares, i.e., two arbitraries combined with one published fare. Examples of two-component constructed fares include
OME-NYC arbitrary+NYC-PAR fare=OME-PAR fare
NYC-PAR fare+PAR-NCE arbitrary=NYC-NCE fare
As the examples show, the arbitrary can be added to either end of the published fare. A three-component constructed fare is shown below, where arbitraries are added to both sides of the published fare
OME-NYC arbitrary+NYC-PAR fare+PAR-NCE arbitrary=OME-NCE fare
In general, two-component constructed fares provide prices between a minor city and a major city, while three-component constructed fares provide prices between two minor cities.
One approach used to fare construction is to use a list of constructed fares called “The Unpublished Fares Product” that is available from Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPCO). ATPCO is an intermediary that maintains fares published by airlines and resellers. With “The Unpublished Fares Product” a cross-product of all arbitraries and all base fares is determined and provided into a list. That list can contain millions of constructed fares.
In addition, there are rules that govern the fare construction process, many of which date back to times when fare construction was performed by hand on paper. In particular, not all arbitraries can combine with all fares; various table-driven compatibility checks are performed to verify that a particular combination is acceptable.
SUMMARY
According to an aspect of the present invention, a method of producing constructed fares that includes an arbitrary added to a published fare is provided. The method is executed in a computer system and the method includes determining interior cities that appear with gateway cities in arbitraries for the airline, searching for gateway cities corresponding to the determined interior cities appearing in the arbitraries and applying an arbitrary corresponding to one of the interior cities to a published fare involving one of the gateway cities to produce the constructed fare.
According to a further aspect of the present invention, a method of producing a set of constructed international fares for an airline is executed in a computer system and includes determining interior cities that appear with gateway cities in arbitraries for the airline, searching for gateway cities corresponding to the determined interior cities appearing in the arbitraries and applying each arbitrary corresponding to each of the determined interior cities to published fares involving the gateway cities to produce the set of constructed fares.
According to a further aspect of the present invention, a computer program product resides on a computer readable medium for producing constructed fares that includes an arbitrary added to a published fare. The computer program product includes instructions for causing a computer system to determine interior cities that appear with gateway cities in arbitraries for the airline, search for gateway cities corresponding to the determined interior cities appearing in the arbitraries and apply an arbitrary corresponding to one of the interior cities to a published fare involving one of the gateway cities to produce the constructed fare.
According to a further aspect of the present invention, a computer program product for producing a set of constructed international fares for an airline resides on a computer readable medium and includes instructions that cause a computer to determine interior cities that appear with gateway cities in arbitraries for the airline, search for gateway cities corresponding to the determined interior cities appearing in the arbitraries and apply each arbitrary corresponding to each of the determined interior cities to published fares involving the gateway cities to produce the set of constructed fares.
According to a further aspect of the present invention, a computer system includes a processor and a memory for storing instructions executed by the processor. The system also includes a storage medium storing a computer program product for producing a set of constructed international fares for an airline. The computer program product includes instructions that cause the processor to determine interior cities that appear with gateway cities in arbitraries for the airline, and search for gateway cities corresponding to the determined interior cities appearing in the arbitraries. The program also includes instructions that cause the processor to apply each arbitrary corresponding to each of the determined interior cities to published fares involving the gateway cities to produce the set of constructed fares.
One or more of the following advantages may be provided from one or more aspects of the invention. The fare construction process produces “constructed fares” in a computational efficient manner. The fare construction process dynamically produces constructed fares. That is, because of the efficiency of the algorithm the fare construction process can produce constructed fares on an “as needed basis”, using the most current information such as currency conversion factors, prices, fares, and fare construction tables. The fare construction process produces two and three component constructed fares. The fare construction process produces the fares efficiently, since although the process is quadruple-nested, branching factors at each loop level are generally small, because there are relatively few gateway cities for a given interior city.
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Cosimano Edward R.
Fish & Richardson P.C.
ITA Software, Inc.
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