down under airlines dua processes over 400 million tickets a year the process of iss 629075

Background Information

Down Under Airlines (DUA) processes over 400 million tickets a year. The process of issuing the tickets is highly automated; a record of each ticket sold is stored in DUA’s database. But when passengers turn in tickets, gate agents stuff the flight coupons into envelopes and ship them to DUA’s Denver headquarters. Because of discrepancies between the original records housed in the ticket database and actual ticket use as reflected by the flight coupons (see the following NOTE), DUA, like other airlines, has to match every coupon against every ticket in the database in order to accurately account for passenger revenues. With the volume of tickets involved, manual matching is a daunting task. Image processing to the rescue! (Note: For example, passengers might use a ticket from one airline to fly with another, or they might use only the A-B leg of an A-B-C flight, and so forth.)