Aggregate Notification System for Shared Balance Thresholds
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Solution Overview
Problem
Service providers face challenges in notifying members of a sharing group about changes in shared balances, leading to unexpected service usage and user surprises, as existing systems often require generating and sending individual notifications for each group member, resulting in high computational load and resource usage.
Innovation Solution
A system that generates aggregate notifications for sharing groups, allowing a single notification to be sent to all members, reducing the computational load and enabling real-time notifications through mediation or third-party applications, while maintaining information about subscribers and thresholds for service usage.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If individual notifications are generated and sent for each group member, then all group members are informed of shared balance changes, but computational load and resource usage increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges individual notification generation into a single aggregate notification that is sent to all group members simultaneously. Instead of processing and sending separate notifications for each subscriber, the system creates one unified notification containing information about the shared balance change and distributes it to all members, thereby maintaining information delivery while significantly reducing computational load and resource consumption.
2Productivity
If aggregate notifications are generated for sharing groups, then computational load is reduced, but the complexity of managing group information and thresholds increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements a universal notification mechanism that handles both individual and group-level notifications through a unified architecture. The charging engine is enhanced with multi-functionality to recognize when a notification should be aggregated at the group level versus sent individually, allowing the same system to handle diverse notification scenarios without requiring separate complex subsystems for each approach.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces a mediation layer between the charging engine and notification delivery systems. This intermediary component handles the complexity of managing group information, determining when aggregation is appropriate, and formatting aggregate notifications. By isolating this complexity in a dedicated mediation layer, the core charging engine remains simpler while still supporting sophisticated group notification capabilities.
3Loss of information
If real-time notifications are sent to all group members, then users are kept informed of shared balance changes, but network resources and message processing overhead increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system merges multiple individual real-time notifications into a single aggregate notification that is distributed to all group members simultaneously. This approach maintains real-time information delivery by ensuring all members receive updated balance information promptly, while reducing network traffic and processing overhead by transmitting one notification instead of multiple separate messages to the same recipients.
Data Source
AI summary
A method, computer program product, and apparatus are disclosed. The method includes determining whether a shared balance threshold has been breached, and notifying a member of a sharing group, in response to a determination that the balance threshold has been breached. The shared balance threshold is for the sharing group, which includes a number of members.