New Seat Reservation System for Japanese National Railways - Distributed Processing Network and High Efficiency Databases

The development of a seat reservation system by JNR (Japanese National Railways) named MARS has been sustained by the growth in passenger transportation operations and the progress of computer technology in Japan. But passenger operations of JNR handled only 23 percent of total passenger traffic in 1985 and the growth in the share of JNR is trifling today. Therefore more efficient and economical operations are being demanded from all departments of JNR. MARS is also required to evolve into an integrated sales management system which can handle efficiently not only seat reservations but also all commodities of JNR such as a wide variety of tickets and package tours. And for expanding terminal network into wider area, high efficiency of the database performance related to main online application processing is strongly required. MARS 301, a new seat reservation system, has been developed to meet these requirements. This paper describes the distributed processing networks and high efficiency databases of this system.