Coordinated Service Allocation through Flexible Reservation.

Services are perishable and are simultaneously produced and consumed. A reservation is a traditional and effective means for coordinating service demand and supply. In recent years, computerized reservation systems have been used widely by many service vendors such as airline companies and hotels to satisfy their customer's demands and improve their profits. In this paper, we propose and describe a more flexible reservation method called "YuuZuu" reservation that motivates cooperation among customers with different preferences for services. It increases utilization of vendor-provided services. The DREAM reservation system, which is an implementation of "YuuZuu" reservation, comprises three functions: (1) reservation allocation, (2) demand analysis, and (3) price optimization. Preliminary experiments show that the DREAM reservation system outperforms a standard reservation system when some customers are insistent upon detailed preferences and others are not, which, we believe, reflects real-world conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]