And they must be prepared to override it, drawing on their years of personal knowledge, experience and intuition. But even hotel managers go on vacation. And when they do, usually the manager's assistant is not as careful. New managers can also become overwhelmed with the system's complexity. It is very complicated to understand, because it is not written to respond to human experience and thinking.
Fuzzy logic is able to model such uncertainty much better than binary logic.
We had informal interviews to learn the way they operate on a daily basis. We also attended 'user group' meetings for the East Coast, where all the hotel managers bring their questions and complaints about the current system. Many questions dealt with how, when and why managers chose to override the computerized revenue management system, he added. A person who has been a manager for 20 years knows how to do things, but he may encounter difficulty relating the hows and whys of his knowledge to others. In later stages of the project, the Duke investigators also plan to evaluate fuzzy logic as efficiency boosters for the hotels' catering services and heating and air conditioning systems.