ATPCO has been awarded a patent in the US for new airline ticket pricing technology developed by its in-house data scientists and technical architects.

It says that airlines will get greater control and flexibility over price points offered in any given market. The new technology allows construction of airline ticket prices using graph database and “functional programming” techniques and enables a new methodology for calculating airfares.

It will detect when pricing elements change, test how different scenarios will price, and validate fares before they are distributed. It will also generate millions of pricing responses in real time, without losing the context of the data that created those prices, and make it easier to change elements of a ticket price.

ATPCO’s approach was engineered to support airline revenue management and pricing departments that manage all the various pricepoints an airline wants to offer. The technology will give carriers and airline channel partners a total view of all prices that make up a market.

Navid Abbassi, Chief Architect at ATPCO said:

“To support these needs, pricing engines need to calculate prices for all possible fares (not just the lowest) and to keep track of all the components that made up the price without relying on cached results. Cached results can become outdated quickly, which creates problems when an airline pricing analyst wants to make changes or audit how or why a particular price was made available.”

John Murphy, Vice President of Technology at ATPCO added:

“This approach maintains all the links to the original data components that make up a total airline ticket price. Therefore, we can deconstruct a price into all its components once it’s generated, as well as identify all the rule provisions that made the price eligible. This has tremendous advantages for the pricing and audit capabilities that we are pursuing.”

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