Revenue management method and critical techniques of railway passenger transport

Purpose–Revenue management(RM)is a significant technique to improve revenue with limited resources.With the macro environment of dramatically increasing transit capacity and rapid railway transport development in China,it is necessary to involve the theory of RM into the operation and decision of railway passenger transport.Design/methodology/approach–This paper proposes the theory and framework of generalized RM of railway passenger transport(RMRPT),and the thoughts and methods of the main techniques in RMRPT,involving demand forecasting,line planning,inventory control,pricing strategies and information systems,are all studied and elaborated.The involved methods and techniques provide a sequential process to help with the decision-making for each stage of RMRPT.The corresponding techniques are integrated into the information system to support practical businesses in railway passenger transport.Findings–The combination of the whole techniques devotes to railway benefit improvement and transit resource utilization and has been applied into the practical operation and organization of railway passenger transport.Originality/value–The development of RMRPT would provide theoretical and technical support for the improvement of service quality as well as railway benefits and efficiency.

Structural Properties in a Hub-to-Hub Network Revenue Management Problem

In this paper,the structural properties of revenue management in a hubto-hub airline network is studied.Using a reformulated network flow version of the problem,it is shown that the optimal value has supermodularity,submodularity,and Lconcavity in the network’s capacities dimensions.It is thus deduced that the certainty equivalent control thresholds used in the revenue management problem have monotone properties.These structural properties add important managerial insights into the network revenue management system.

Application of Online Reverse Auctions in Revenue Management of Airline Company

Based On the online reverse auction formalism in Priceline.com, In this paper,the use of online reverse auctions in airline companies revenue management is highlighted.This research examines the process of online reverse auctions in detail, point out the potential benefits of online reverse auctions. At last we examines how the online reverse auction mechanism design for optimal allocation.

HEDNA workshop on revenue management essentials for edistribution

The Hotel Electronic Distribution Network Association (HEDNA), in conjunction with their education management partner, HSA International, will host the new two-day "fundamentals" workshop on applying Revenue Management techniques within Electronic Distribution channels in advance of the opening of the HEDNA 2004 Conference in London.

Warwick International Hotels installs Optims Revenue Management System

Optims S.A. (Evry, France), the leading global provider of Revenue Management Systems (RMS) and IT enabling solutions dedicated to the hospitality, tourism and transport industries is pleased to announce the implementation of an Optims.Hotel Revenue Management System in the Royal Windsor Hotel, Brussels, a Warwick International Hotel and a member of Leading Hotels of the World.

A dynamic model for railway freight overbooking

In order to apply overbooking idea in Chinese railway freight industry to improve revenue, a Markov decision process(dynamic programming) model for railway freight reservation was formulated and the overbooking limit level was proposed as a control policy. However, computing the dynamic programming treatment needs six nested loops and this will be burdensome for real-world problems. To break through the calculation limit, the properties of value function were analyzed and the overbooking protection level was proposed to reduce the calculating quantity. The simulation experiments show that the overbooking protection level for the lower-fare class is higher than that for the higher-fare class, so the overbooking strategy is nested by fare class. Besides, by analyzing the influence on the overbooking strategy of freight arrival probability and cancellation probability, the proposed approach is efficient and also has a good application prospect in reality. Also, compared with the existing reservation(FCFS), the overbooking strategy performs better in the fields of vacancy reduction and revenue improvement.

Seat inventory control methods for Chinese passenger railways

Railway seat inventory control strategies play a crucial role in the growth of profit and train load factor. The railway passenger seat inventory control problem in China was addressed. Chinese passenger railway operation features and seat inventory control practice were analyzed firstly. A dynamic demand forecasting method was introduced to forecast the coming demand in a ticket booking period. By clustering, passengers' historical ticket bookings were used to forecast the demand to come in a ticket booking period with least squares support vector machine. Three seat inventory control methods: non-nested booking limits, nested booking limits and bid-price control, were modeled under a single-fare class. Different seat inventory control methods were compared with the same demand based on ticket booking data of Train T15 from Beijing West to Guangzhou. The result shows that the dynamic non-nested booking limits control method performs the best, which gives railway operators evidence to adjust the remaining capacity in a ticket booking period.

Impact of Capacity Parameters on Flexible Inventory Control Decision Model

From the mathematical point of view,the flexible inventory control model is proved in the practical problem application and the rationality of the capacity parameter selection and calculation.The purpose is to actively respond to demand fluctuations when there is a demand forecast error or a missing part of the demand information,and to avoid the risk of passive variable demand forecasting to set the immutable inventory capacity.At the same time,the game is controlled by the flexible and variable inventory control strategy and the customer’s willingness to demand.The paper mainly studies the influence of the setting of capacity parameters on the booking-limit decision and its benefits under the control of flexible space with variable total capacity.Through the two trends of capacity increase flexibility and capacity reduction flexibility in the flexible inventory control model,the mathematical performance and marginal utility methods are introduced to change the performance of the booking-limit control decision model under different scenarios.The correlation analysis between the capacity limit level and the return under the optimal Bookinglimit decision,and the above two flexibility parameters are obtained.

Information provision and consumer search behavior for products with asymmetric uncertainty

When selling multiple products with asymmetric uncertainty,should the seller disclose product information so that customers do not have to incur any cost to resolve their uncertainties;if so,which product should the seller choose?To address these questions,we consider a monopolist selling two substitutable products to a group of consumers.Each consumer has asymmetric uncertainty regarding the two products.A total of four different information provision structures are considered based on whether the seller discloses information about each product with the aim of determining which strategy provides the seller with the greatest revenue.We derive several interesting results.First,the optimal information provision strategy depends on the magnitude of uncertainty in relation to the product with lower uncertainty.Specifically,if the uncertainty regarding the product with lower uncertainty is sufficiently small,it is optimal for the seller to provide information about the product with higher uncertainty,otherwise,the seller should provide information about both products.Second,when only one product's information should be revealed,it is optimal for the seller to choose the product with higher uncertainty and charge a higher price.Third,withholding information on both products is never optimal for the seller.Finally,our main model is extended by examining the Mean-Preserving Spread setting,and the robustness of our main results is confirmed.Furthermore,we examine the situation in which a monopolist sells a single product with two main attributes.We find that each of the four information provision strategies can be optimal under various scenarios.

Joint slot allocation and dynamic pricing of container sea-rail multimodal transportation

The container sea-rail multimodal transport system faces complex challenges with de- mand uncertainties for joint slot allocation and dynamic pricing. The challenge is formulated as a two-stage optimal model based on revenue management （RM） as actual slots sale of multi-node container sea-rail multimodal transport usually includes contract sale to large shippers and free sale to scattered shippers. First stage in the model utilizes an origin-destination control approach, formulated as a stochastic integer programming equation, to settle long-term slot allocation in the contract market and empty container allocation. Second stage in the model is formulated as a stochastic nonlinear programming equation to solve a multiproduct joint dynamic pricing and inventory control problem for price settling and slot allocation in each period of free market. Considering the random nature of demand, the methods of chance constrained programming and robust optimi- zation are utilized to transform stochastic models into deterministic models. A numerical experiment is presented to verify the availability of models and solving methods. Results of considering uncertain/certain demand are compared, which show that the two-stage optimal strategy integrating slot allocation with dynamic pricing considering random de- mand is revealed to increase the revenue for multimodal transport operators （MTO） while concurrently satisfying shippers＇ demand. Research resulting from this paper will contribute to the theory and practice of container sea-rail multimodal transport revenue management and provide a scientific decision-making tool for MTO.

Three-stage decision approach of network dynamic pricing and seat inventory control

The dynamic joint pricing and seat inventory control is more practical but complicated in both formulation and solving.This paper presents a three-stage decision approach(TSDA)to attack this problem.In the first stage,the relationship between dynamic prices and their pre-sale periods is built.The game process between passengers and the airline based on maximisation of both passenger utility and airline’s network revenue is applied.Passenger’s booking and cancellation processes are simulated according to respective distributions.In the second stage,the seat allocation model for different itineraries is built based on presented unified prices.It greatly decreases computation complexity since prices,itinerary legs and pre-sale time periods are excluded from combination.In the third stage,itinerary-based revenue management model is built with embedding the nested control strategy inside.Meanwhile,some practical factors such as cancellation and no-show are considered.The experimental computation results show TSDA is effective.