Re: Bidirectional Binary Self-Joins

Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote:
...
> so one of the "ten impossible" things (current ROUTES couldn't do and
> we were suppose to implement), was being able to find connections
> between any two airports (some 4k plus) in the world. for demo, they
> would give two airports codes ... frequently ones that nobody had ever
> heard of before on opposite sides of the world. there were some that
> took more than 24hrs elapsed time with 5-6 different connections.
> ...

I knew one consulting company that charged an airline a lot of money to do that. Eventually the effort was stopped when both parties were asked to solve the "travelling salesman" problem in a most general way, which was more or less what they were trying to do. The problem was new to both parties, even to the airline's most experienced business analysts!   What's more, since that airline did a lot of contracting out to other airlines, they wanted to include all airports known to IATA, which numbered about 6,000 airports at the time.

The segment combinations that involved factorials also got the consulting companies quite interested, suggesting schemas of hundreds of tables for routing alone, let alone all the other stuff an airline has to account for today.

p Received on Sat Mar 31 2007 - 04:19:24 CEST