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automated booking

Posted: Tue May 18, 2010 1:49 am
by arminium
Hi guys, i have a large project that i am looking at doing and just interested in ideas on design / structure

the site is automated car hire bookings,

there is around 100+ vehicles and they are items broken down into several categories

and i would like the system to automatically work out the best car to allocate, and then put that in a table to be confirmed

the majority of the site is a big job but fairly stright forward

I'm just fishing for structure suggestions on the automation of suggesting a booking and/or automated asset reshuffle to book the vehicles in as tight as possible

and suggest to staff/admin an upgrade where no possibilities are available

kind of like an automated Gant chart

I have looked extensively for something available, but to no avail

Jason

Re: automated booking

Posted: Tue May 18, 2010 3:10 am
by Benjamin
You more than likely would want to use the entity attribute model. You would have a table storing your objects (cars) and another table holding the attributes (features, capabilities etc).

This allows for flexibility and enables you to quickly pull all of the attributes for a selected vehicle very easily. The attributes could even be broken down into types or categories, so that you could access subsets, rather than all of them.

As far as your question regarding the recommendation algorithm, this is something you will need to create yourself. It's very unlikely you will find a chunk of code that will suit your particular requirements perfectly. There are books on Amazon you can learn from that teach programming intelligence, but it's doubtful your requirements are that complex.

Re: automated booking

Posted: Tue May 18, 2010 5:50 pm
by arminium
Yeah was thinking along the lines of EAV for the system itself, never knew it was called that till today thou

and the procedural bit , i was more after ideas, on which way to attack it, i think that the model could be built using unix timestamp...

the tricky bit is knowing the time start -> end + buffer ( for cleaning/ turn around) weather to try to catalogue it as vacant time or check each booked instance each time it is run, i think that knowing the available time slots would be easier, but this would be a massive amount of stored nothing--ness, alternatively we have a resource hungry check

Jason