Amadeus takes on Sabre; European system set to extend worldwide - Amadeus airline reservation and information network - Field Report

European system set to extend worldwide

Since its inauguration last January, the Amadeus airline reservation and information network has grown to serve 80 airlines and 65,000 terminals, mostly in European airline offices and travel agents. Amadeus aims to broaden its ownership into new continents later this year, taking on the American Airlines-owned competing reservation system, Sabre.

Amadeus has four main partners: Air France, the Lufthansa German Airlines, Iberia Airlines of Spain and the Scandanavian Air System (SAS). These carriers, in turn, host a number of smaller airlines for a total of 80. The partners plan to move Amadeus beyond European ownership by adding Thai Airways International, Ltd., this year while working hard to add Varig Brazilian Airlines to the system, according to Giovanni Soldini, director of applications development for Amadeus, based in Madrid, Spain.

At the heart of the operation's data center in Munich, Germany, are its two databases -- the computerized reservation system, called the Global Core, and the Fare Quote System. The databases handle hundreds of messages per second and over 1 million transactions per day.

Contrary to some popular opinion that the only good information technology is new technology, Global Core is based on IBM's Transaction Processing Facility (TPF), which is over 20 years old. The Fare Quote System was written in Assembler and Fortran.

"TPF is the only technology that gives us the performance we need, which is thousands of messages per second," Soldini said. "We are only at approximately 500 [messages] per second right now, but we hope to grow. Sabre gets about 2,000 per second from TPF.

"It's absolutely impossible to get that type of performance with any other database," he continued. In fact, Soldini said, "The only changes that have been done is a tool [that was jointly] developed by Swissair, Alitalia and British Airways to allow the programmer to work with the database in a more generalized way."

The tool, called TPF-DB, is said to improve on the traditional TPF technique for accessing data, which is simply to have the physical address for the record. "It makes it easier for the programmer. Instead of keeping the physical address, you can work more logically," Soldini said. "It's a minor improvement, really."

TPF-based systems are now processing 150 million PNRs per year, Soldini noted.

The Global Core is linked in realtime to the national systems of all Amadeus members "because the realtime inventory of flights is contained in those systems. We have a copy that is updated online and we check it with the realtime version at the national carrier," Soldini said.

The review is made to avoid a situation which some observers say often occurs in airline reservation systems -- the system "has accurate inventory [on the availability of seats] for companies that own the system and less accurate information for the others," Soldini said.

'MASSIVE DAILY UPDATES'

The Global Core, with its flight schedule database, is built to access the Fare Quote server system, which runs on a Unisys 1100 from Unisys Corp., Blue Bell, Pa. At a mere 1 million lines of code, Fare Quote is only one-third the size of the Global Core. Nevertheless, Soldini said, "It's a complicated database. It's updated by all of the carriers through the international organizations that gather pricing information, and by the carriers themselves. It has massive daily updates and minor continual updates."

More specifically, 20% of the Fare Quote database's tariff information, or 4 million items, are replaced weekly, said Joel Soyris, director of development for the Fare Quote system.

Fare Quote was written by Air France engineers in a project started in 1985 under contract to Amadeus.

The Fare Quote system can process about 40 transactions per second, said Soyris. The average processing time for each transaction is 400 milliseconds; though for more complex queries it can take up to 10 seconds, he said.

Mainly two types of desktop systems are connected to the Amadeus network--dumb terminals, usually installed at the airline terminal offices, and personal computers in travel agencies, Soldini said.

Data entry on the dumb terminals is quite cryptic, but since the airline terminal clerks largely repeat the same operations, it does not pose a problem, he contended. At travel agencies, Amadeus has installed local software that provides "masks, drawings and colors, so the navigation through the system is quite easy for them," Soldini said.

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