Research On Dynamic Cache Strategy For Flight Search Engine

With the rapid development of China’s economy, the domestic civil aviation market has also ushered in booming development. More and more travelers prefer taking aircraft for long distance travel. At the same time with the development of Internet, airlines have set up their own official websites to provide service of searching and booking to customers. What’s more, Internet has gradually taken the place of telephone to become the most preferable way to search and book tickets. So the airlines have to spend more on the websites for the growing user traffic, in order to gain advantages in competition with other airlines.In this context, cache technology for flights search begins to attract attentions, which can bring a lot of benefits. On one hand it can respond to the fast growing search traffic effectively and reduce operational cost for airlines without changing the existing architecture of backend service. On the other hand it speeds up the response to users, thus improving the user experience.Cache coherency algorithm is the main topic in the research of search cache. In this paper we propose three cache strategy based on TTL (Time-to-Live) mechanism. First we build a mathematical model between TTL and search error rate. Then we get an analytical expression for TTL, as the analytical TTL model. Second we extract some features from the query and build a linear regression model to predict TTL. Finally we propose the adaptive TTL model, which dynamically adjusts the current TTL depending on whether the cache result of expired entry is still valid.The experiments show that the fix TTL model, which is broadly used in other search cache fields, doesn’t fit for the field of flight online search. And the dynamic cache strategy proposed in this paper can gain better performance, not only guarantee lower search error rate, but also reduce more redundant search. So the dynamic cache strategy proposed in this paper can help airlines to ease backend pressure, reduce operational cost and enhance competitiveness.