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Allotment Problem in Travel Industry: A Solution Based on ASP

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9209))

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Abstract

In the travel industry it is common for tour operators to pre-book from service suppliers blocks of package tours, which are called allotments in jargon. The selection of package tours is done according to several preference criteria aimed at maximizing the expected earnings given a budget. In this paper we formalize an allotment problem that abstracts the requirements of a real travel agent, and we solve it using Answer Set Programming. The obtained specification is executable, and it implements an advanced feature of the iTravel+ system.

This work has been partially supported by the Calabrian Region under PIA project iTravelPlus POR FESR Calabria 2007–2013.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ASP solvers may have undefined behaviors in presence of negative weights. A work-around is to augment the weight of the weak constraint by the maximum possible earnings.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to DLV SYSTEM s.r.l. for its support in the development of the system and to Denise Angilica, Gianluigi Greco, and Gianni Laboccetta for fruitful discussions on the specification of the problem.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Calabria, Cosenza, Italy

    Carmine Dodaro, Nicola Leone, Barbara Nardi & Francesco Ricca

Authors
  1. Carmine Dodaro
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  2. Nicola Leone
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  3. Barbara Nardi
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  4. Francesco Ricca
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Carmine Dodaro .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

    Balder ten Cate

  2. National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

    Alessandra Mileo

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Dodaro, C., Leone, N., Nardi, B., Ricca, F. (2015). Allotment Problem in Travel Industry: A Solution Based on ASP. In: ten Cate, B., Mileo, A. (eds) Web Reasoning and Rule Systems. RR 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9209. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22002-4_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22002-4_7

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22002-4

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