Availability processing in a travel planning system

Abstract

A travel planning system that implements seat availability determinations is described. The planning system includes a scheduling process for determining a set of instances of transportation that satisfy a user query and a faring process that determines fares valid for at least some of the instances in the set of instances of transportation. The travel planning system also includes an availability process that uses results from a single source of seat availability for a mode of transportation to determine a set of available instances of transportation and determines whether the results from the single source are reliable.

1 . A travel planning system comprises:
 a scheduling process for determining a set of instances of transportation that satisfy a user query;   a faring process that determines fares valid for at least some of the instances in the set of instances of transportation; and   an availability process that use results from a single source of seat availability for a mode of transportation to determine a set of available instances of transportation and determines whether the results from the single source are reliable.   
     
     
         2 . The travel planning system of  claim 1  wherein if the availability process determines that the results are not reliable, the availability process makes a second seat availability queries to a different source of seat availability information. 
     
     
         3 . The travel planning system of  claim 1  wherein the availability process makes multiple, sequential seat availability queries to multiple sources of seat availability information. 
     
     
         4 . The travel planning system of  claim 1  wherein the availability process makes multiple simultaneous seat availability queries to multiple sources. 
     
     
         5 . The travel planning system of  claim 1  wherein the sources of seat availability information have differing fixed and marginal costs associated with obtaining information, including computation, communication, time, and cost. 
     
     
         6 . The travel planning system of  claim 5  wherein the travel planning process controls costs by setting a threshold limit on the availability process to access the sources for at least one of the costs. 
     
     
         7 . The travel planning system of  claim 6  wherein the thresholds are timeouts or price limits. 
     
     
         8 . The travel planning system of  claim 7  wherein the availability process prioritizes queries to an availability source to remain under a specified cost limit. 
     
     
         9 . The travel planning system of  claim 1  wherein the sources of seat availability information generate replies with differing quality properties such as freshness, confidence, precision, and validity. 
     
     
         10 . The travel planning system of  claim 1  wherein the availability process determines tradeoffs between the cost of a query and the properties of the response. 
     
     
         11 . The travel planning system of  claim 1  wherein the availability process speculatively determines travel options using low-quality, uncertain, or missing availability data as though they were high-quality or certain data. 
     
     
         12 . The travel planning system of  claim 11  wherein the low-quality answers used are not returned from any external source of availability information but are guessed or computed internal to the travel planning process. 
     
     
         13 . The travel planning system of  claim 11  wherein the results of the speculative computation are used to decide what additional seat availability queries should be issued, what sources should be queried, what quality data are needed, or what cost to incur to get additional information. 
     
     
         14 . The travel planning system of  claim 1  wherein the travel planning process data containing scheduling and fare information and availability data to an intelligent client for further processing and integration by the client.