gtpc3m09Concepts and Structures

TPF System History

The origins of the TPF system can be traced back to systems created in the late 1950s to satisfy the requirements of airline reservation agents who accessed an inventory of available space on available flights for the purpose of selling tickets. A sale requires the deletion of a seat from the inventory of space and the creation of a passenger name record that accounts for the use of the seat.

This function, which is still a requirement today, is performed in real time and frequently occurs over two types of communication lines. A person representing an airline communicates with a customer by means of an ordinary telephone call, but accesses the necessary data using a terminal or workstation that is linked to a processing center through wide area communication facilities (see Figure 3). The customer requesting a reservation is remote from the end user (airline agent) who in turn is remote from the data.

End users within the vernacular of the TPF system are commonly called agents, and the data usage requests they generate are called (input) messages. The important TPF characteristic persists: the ability to accept unpredictable and very high message volumes at a processing center that gives business agents access to a shared centralized repository of information (database) that is updated in real time.

Figure 3. Airline Reservation Application