padam-0 / aeroplane_seating_assign

Airline Seating Assignment

Peter Adam - 16201859
Andy McSweeney - 16203117

Software Specification

seat_assign_16201859_16203177.py is a software algorithm to allocate seats on an airline when passengers make bookings, and write them to a database. For each flight, seats are allocated to passengers, and bookings of multiple passengers are allocated seats together where possible.

Each flight is different, and the algorithm can deal with different airline configurations, as contained in the flight database.

The bookings take the form of a .CSV where each line consists of one integer representing the name of the person making the booking and number of passengers in the party. Seats are allocated in booking order.

Use

The software has three main usages:

1. Allocate Seats from a booking file;
2. Clean a flight database to an empty form; and
3. Create a flight database for new planes.

Seat Allocation

This option is specified from the command line by calling:

python seat_assign_16201859_16203177.py data.db bookings.csv

where data.db is the flight database and bookings.csv is the .CSV file of bookings.

A list of bookings will be printed to the command line with the booking name and number of passengers in the booking, as well as a statement about whether the party was seated or refused. If the party was seated but split, multiple lines indicate the seating plan for that party.

After all bookings have been processed, 3 summary statistics are printed. The first contains the total number of passengers seated. The second shows how many parties were split, and the last contains the total number of passengers who were refused entry.

Parties split refers to the number of ways the booking was split in order to accomodate all passengers. As such, a 4 person booking that was split 2,2 is recorded as a 1 party split, but a 5 person booking that was split 3,1,1 is recorded as a 2 party split.

If there are more passengers in a booking than there are empty seats on the plane, the entire booking is refused and seats filled with subsequent (smaller) bookings.

Database Cleaning

This option is specified from the command line by calling:

python seat_assign_16201859_16203177.py clean data.db

where data.db is the flight database.

This function will set all seats in the seating table to empty, and reset metrics to 0. rows_cols will be untouched.

Flight Creation

This option is specified from the command line by calling:
python seat_assign_16201859_16203177.py create data.db rows seats
where sata.db is the flight database, rows is the number of rows(ie 10) and seats is the seating configuration (ie ABCDEF).

The flight database can exist (but must be completely empty) or will be created by the function.

This function will create a database, populate the rows_cols table with the specified number of rows and columns, initialise the metrics table to 0, and populate the seating table with all seat combinations, and set these seats to empty.