I have an application that is supposed to book flights for customers within their specified budget. As such I have customer data and available flights data. I then develop the solutions in Clojure as follows.
First, I create a flights atom:
(def flights
(atom []))
I then create a function to initialize flights into an atom containing a collection of refs. Here I pass flights data which is included further down this post.
(defn initialize-flights [initial-flights]
(reset! flights (map ref initial-flights)))
I then process customers through the process-customers function as follows. And this is where it gets really confusing.
(defn process-customers [customers]
(doseq [customer1 (partitionCustomerInput N-THREADS customers)]
(doseq [customer2 customer1]
(swap! flights
(fn [flights_collection]
(if-let [updated-flight (process-customer flights_collection customer2)]
(assoc flights (:id updated-flight) updated-flight)
flights_collection)))))
(reset! finished-processing? true))
Inside process-customers I pass flights-collection to process-customer (notice process-customer is a helper function for process-customers and they are not the same function). Flights-collection at this point is a collection of flight refs process-customer is supposed to search through the list and in case a customer qualifies for a flight therein, it uses the book function to edit the flight. How should I pass flights-collection to process-customer? As it is, process-customer does not search through the flight refs and it does not alter the flight refs either?
Below is the process-customer function followed by its helper functions.
(defn- process-customer [flights customer]
"Try to book a flight from `flights` for `customer`, returning the updated
flight if found, or nil if no suitable flight was found."
(if-let [{:keys [flight price]} (find-flight flights customer)]
(let [updated-flight (book flight price (:seats customer))]
(log "Customer" (:id customer) "booked" (:seats customer)
"seats on flight" (:id updated-flight) "at $" price " (< budget of $"
(:budget customer) ").")
updated-flight)
(do
(log "Customer" (:id customer) "did not find a flight.")
nil)))
(defn filter-pricing-with-n-seats [pricing seats]
"Get `pricing` for which there are at least `seats` empty seats available."
(filter #(>= (second %) seats) pricing))
(defn lowest-available-price [flight seats]
"Returns the lowest price in `flight` for which at least `seats` empty seats
are available, or nil if none found."
(-> (:pricing flight) ; [[price available taken]]
(filter-pricing-with-n-seats seats)
(sort-pricing)
(first) ; [price available taken]
(first))) ; price
(defn- find-flight [flights customer]
"Find a flight in `flights` that is on the route and within the budget of
`customer`. If a flight was found, returns {:flight flight :price price},
else returns nil."
(let [{:keys [_id from to seats budget]}
customer
flights-and-prices
; flights that are on the route and within budget, and their price
(for [f flights
:when (and (= (:from f) from) (= (:to f) to))
:let [lowest-price (lowest-available-price f seats)]
:when (and (some? lowest-price) (<= lowest-price budget))]
{:flight f :price lowest-price})
cheapest-flight-and-price
(first (sort-by :price flights-and-prices))]
cheapest-flight-and-price))
(defn- book [flight price seats]
"Updates `flight` to book `seats` at `price`."
(update flight :pricing
(fn [pricing]
(for [[p a t] pricing]
(if (= p price)
[p (- a seats) (+ t seats)]
[p a t])))))
(def finished-processing?
"Set to true once all customers have been processed, so that sales process
can end."
(atom false))
(defn partitionCustomerInput
[threads customers]
(let [partitions (partition-all
(Math/ceil (/ (count customers) threads)) customers)]
partitions))
Below is the main function. It initializes flights and kickstarts customer procecessing
(defn main []
(initialize-flights input/flights)
(let [f1 (future (time (process-customers input/customers)))
@f1
)
(println "Flights:")
(print-flights (map deref @flights)))
(main)
(shutdown-agents)
Below are the customers and flights collection.
(def flights
[{:id 0
:from "BRU" :to "ATL"
:carrier "Delta"
:pricing [[600 150 0] ; price; # seats available at that price; # seats taken at that price
[650 50 0]
[700 50 0]
[800 50 0]]}
{:id 1
:from "BRU" :to "LON"
:carrier "Brussels Airlines"
:pricing [[300 150 0]
[350 50 0]
[370 20 0]
[380 30 0]]}
{:id 2
:from "BRU" :to "LON"
:carrier "Brussels Airlines"
:pricing [[250 100 0]
[300 50 0]]}
{:id 3
:from "BRU" :to "MAD"
:carrier "Brussels Airlines"
:pricing [[200 150 0]
[250 50 0]
[300 100 0]]}
{:id 4
:from "BRU" :to "MAD"
:carrier "Iberia"
:pricing [[250 150 0]
[300 50 0]]}])
(def customers
[{:id 0 :from "BRU" :to "ATL" :seats 5 :budget 700}
{:id 1 :from "BRU" :to "ATL" :seats 5 :budget 550}
{:id 2 :from "BRU" :to "LON" :seats 6 :budget 270}
{:id 3 :from "BRU" :to "ATL" :seats 4 :budget 600}
{:id 4 :from "BRU" :to "LON" :seats 3 :budget 270}
{:id 5 :from "BRU" :to "LON" :seats 9 :budget 250}
{:id 6 :from "BRU" :to "MAD" :seats 5 :budget 200}
{:id 7 :from "BRU" :to "MAD" :seats 9 :budget 150}
{:id 8 :from "BRU" :to "LON" :seats 5 :budget 250}
{:id 9 :from "BRU" :to "ATL" :seats 4 :budget 500}
{:id 10 :from "BRU" :to "MAD" :seats 1 :budget 180}
{:id 11 :from "BRU" :to "LON" :seats 2 :budget 320}
{:id 12 :from "BRU" :to "ATL" :seats 3 :budget 850}
{:id 13 :from "BRU" :to "ATL" :seats 4 :budget 200}])
Also, note that I want to use refs for this implementation to alter the flights as ref offers support for coordinated read and writes to change the flights atomically. I aim to formulate a highly parallelized solution for this application and conflicts cannot be tolerated.
