Airline Management 101
It's not rocket science, Sam said. But to me, a newbie, both in Java and this Ticket Reservation and Airline Inventory System, this IS almost as difficult as rocket science. Sure, basically, as my entry point to this project, building CRUD modules for several tables is feasible. Yet this redundancy columns, or to put in technical term, unnormalized tables, seem overwhelming. So I asked him about what's been driving this kind of design.
I finally find out that redundancy is quite important, when the system consists of a lot of tables (read: flight schedule tables), which naturally evolves a lot in daily basis, the design should provide a mechanism to maintain data integrity. Normally, flight segment is generated, using a pretty simple formula in which a user combine flight and route. Later, schedule is generated by assigning effective date to those newly generated segment. Finally, that 'raw' schedule could be later finalized, according to current or predicted situation that might affect the already scheduled flights.
This might seem like a part of the core of airline management. As part of course, flight management doesn't not mean anything without other aspect of airline business. Other aspects, such as, aircraft and aircrew assignment and ticketing, together with flight management, build the whole main business of an airline. In this highly competitive age among air carriers, a simple and low cost of flight management system means a lot in providing a lower overall cost of the business which in turn provide lower ticket price. This kind of cost-cutting solution could benefit both side, airlines and passengers, without sacrificing important posts such aircraft maintenance and crew management.
When it comes to ticket reservation, airline should work hand in hand with travel offices which act as mediator between airlines and passengers. However, consider a major headache faced by those travel offices who have to deal with a number of different mainframe systems employed by different airlines. Different systems, although following a certain set of rules concerning their behavior, might be eventually configured by their own admnistrators, which later result in different 'de facto' protocol. That's why a 'facilitator' could act as an ultimate broker between travel offices and airlines.
I finally find out that redundancy is quite important, when the system consists of a lot of tables (read: flight schedule tables), which naturally evolves a lot in daily basis, the design should provide a mechanism to maintain data integrity. Normally, flight segment is generated, using a pretty simple formula in which a user combine flight and route. Later, schedule is generated by assigning effective date to those newly generated segment. Finally, that 'raw' schedule could be later finalized, according to current or predicted situation that might affect the already scheduled flights.
This might seem like a part of the core of airline management. As part of course, flight management doesn't not mean anything without other aspect of airline business. Other aspects, such as, aircraft and aircrew assignment and ticketing, together with flight management, build the whole main business of an airline. In this highly competitive age among air carriers, a simple and low cost of flight management system means a lot in providing a lower overall cost of the business which in turn provide lower ticket price. This kind of cost-cutting solution could benefit both side, airlines and passengers, without sacrificing important posts such aircraft maintenance and crew management.
When it comes to ticket reservation, airline should work hand in hand with travel offices which act as mediator between airlines and passengers. However, consider a major headache faced by those travel offices who have to deal with a number of different mainframe systems employed by different airlines. Different systems, although following a certain set of rules concerning their behavior, might be eventually configured by their own admnistrators, which later result in different 'de facto' protocol. That's why a 'facilitator' could act as an ultimate broker between travel offices and airlines.
Comments