What?
This is the full-fledged version of Individual Travel Request Generation (bulk) and at the core of the ASTD project.
As the name suggests, point-2-point travel requests would also include origin and destination, travel date and return date, among several other advanced parameters (like for cancellations/no-shows). Then, an individual search for possible connections is triggered for each and every such travel request. Generation wouldn’t happen for a single airport once a day, but passengers would “book naturally” over time, possibly taking into account day and night time patterns (bookings from a particular region will predominantly happen when it’s daytime in said region).
Why?
It is a prerequisite for reaching the full potential of the Distribution System in that it allows full return itineraries from locations not bound to specific airports. Especially for low-cost models, this makes a huge difference. It also makes traffic a lot more dynamic, as currently the destinations of an airport are a fixed set that doesn’t change (at least not on a regular basis).
When?
Whether we will be able to transplant this into current-gen AirlineSim is somewhat open. We pulled a lot of tricks to make it work in ASTD and we might just not get it to work in the existing system, but we’d certainly love to try.