Combining case based and constraint based techniques in travel reservation systems

This paper describes a system which uses case based reasoning to deal with large constraint satisfaction problems associated with the assembly of holiday packages. The system aims to reduce the amount of consistency checking in terms of database queries. The holiday reservation problem is characterised by exhibiting large cardinality in the constraint tables. In order to reduce the load on the database server, issues concerning the similarity measurement, the quality of the exemplars in the case base and the conflict ordering problem are addressed. By using the case based approach with the strategies suggested in this paper, improved performance can be achieved