Links from today's class (Sabre & ITA software)

[Subbarao Kambhampati <rao@asu.edu>]

SABRE system

 SABRE turns out to be the brainchild of American Airlines and IBM.
Here is a CNN article on its history:

  

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9906/29/1960.idg/


Check out

http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_09_02.html to get a layperson idea
about the complexity of 
airline ticket pricing (and the story of how ITA software--the technology
behind ORBITZ--works).
Here is a teaser:


You can get a sense of just how complicated the real situation is when
you consider that with airlines offering thousands of different fares,
with different sets of rules governing the different legs on each trip,
if two people take a round trip together, with three flights in each
direction, there can be as many as 1,00012, or around
1036, fare combinations. If you printed out a ticket for each
possible fare, the pile would stretch all the way to the nearest star,
Proxima Centauri, four light years way.



Rao