tvlsim

C++ Simulated Travel-Oriented Distribution System Library

Summary

The Travel Market Simulator project aims at providing reference implementation, mainly in C++, of a travel market simulator, focusing on revenue management (RM) for airlines. It is intended to be used for applied research activities only: it is by no way intended to be used by production systems. It is a new breed of software and aims to become the new generation PODS (http://podsresearch.com/), which was instrumental in the inception of the Travel Market Simulator project.

Over a dozen components have been implemented and are fully functional, encompassing for instance (but not limited to) traveller demand generation (booking requests), travel distribution (GDS/CRS), low fare search (LFS), price calculation and inventory availability calculation), customer choice modelling (CCM), revenue management (RM), schedule and inventory management, revenue accounting (RA).

The Travel Market Simulator can used in either batch or hosted mode. It is the main component of the Travel Market Simulator: https://travel-sim.org

That project makes an extensive use of existing open-source libraries for increased functionality, speed and accuracy. In particular the Boost (C++ Standard Extensions: https://www.boost.org) library is used.

The TvlSim component itself aims at providing a clean API and a simple implementation, as a C++ library, of a travel market simulator, focusing on revenue management (RM) for airlines. That library uses the Standard Airline IT C++ object model (https://github.com/airsim/stdair).

Installation

On Fedora/CentOS/RedHat distribution

Just use DNF:

$ dnf -y install tvlsim-devel tvlsim-doc

You can also get the RPM packages (which may work on Linux distributions like Novel Suse and Mandriva) from the Fedora repository (e.g., for Fedora Rawhide, https://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/fedora/devel/rawhide/x86_64/)

Building the library and test binary from Git repository

The Git repository may be cloned as following:

$ git clone git@github.com:airsim/tvlsim.git tvlsimgit # through SSH
$ git clone https://github.com/airsim/tvlsim.git # if the firewall filters SSH
$ cd tvlsimgit

Then, you need the following packages (Fedora/RedHat/CentOS names here, but names may vary according to distributions):

Building the library and test binary from the tarball

The latest stable source tarball (tvlsim*.tar.gz or .bz2) can be found here: https://github.com/airsim/tvlsim/releases

To customise the following to your environment, you can alter the path to the installation directory:

export INSTALL_BASEDIR="${HOME}/dev/deliveries"
export TVLSIM_VER="1.01.7"
if [ -d /usr/lib64 ]; then LIBSUFFIX="64"; fi
export LIBSUFFIX_4_CMAKE="-DLIB_SUFFIX=$LIBSUFFIX"

Then, as usual:

simulate binary:

The simulate executable requires a MySQL/MariaDB relational database. Also, the StdAir package contains helper scripts in order to create:

Following is a sequence of commands allowing to initialise the MySQL database correctly:

$ /usr/libexec/stdair/create_tvlsim_user.sh
# Then, enter the credentials of an admin MySQL account.
# Launch with the '-h' option to see how to change the hostname and/or port.
$ /usr/libexec/stdair/create_tvlsim_db.sh
# Then, enter the credentials of an admin MySQL account.
# Launch with the '-h' option to see how to change the hostname and/or port.
$ /usr/libexec/stdair/load_tvlsim_data.sh
# Launch with the '-h' option to see how to change the hostname and/or port.
$ simulate
$ less simulate.log

TvlSimServer binary:

Same as for the simulate executable. A command-line (test) client exists in Python (appserver/django/tvlsimClient.py).

$ TvlSimServer &
$ wget https://raw.github.com/airsim/tvlsim/trunk/appserver/django/tvlsimClient.py
$ python tvlsimClient.py
$ kill %1
$ less tvlsimServer.log

Note that a Django-based Web application server also exists, but it has not been packaged yet.

Denis Arnaud