| Title | Revenue Management for Parallel Trains Considering Unreserved Seats |
| Year | 2018 |
| Degree | Master |
| School | Department of Transportation & Logistics Management National Chiao Tung University |
| Author | |
| Summary | Rail has been one of the most important transportation modes in Taiwan. With the progress of technology, the railway industry has gradually improved the speed and the service quality. However, it appears that not many studies have been from the aspect of management, especially the revenue management (RM) techniques used in this research.
In this study, in order to increase the revenue, ticket sales are controlled by setting up booking limits. In particular, the parallel-train feature and the unreserved (free) seats are taken into consideration. This is because for railway operation, multiple trains may depart within in a short period of time. Therefore, customers may consider all suitable trains, the so-called parallel trains, when making their decision. In addition to the consideration over parallel trains, another very important characteristic of railway transportation is the case of unreserved seats, in which passengers are accepted without having a fixed seat assignment. In terms of model formulation, this study develop an integer programming (IP) model, which determines the booking limits of each train for each origin-destination. In order to evaluate the increase of revenue contributed by the IP model, a simulation experiment has been performed, by simulating the ticket purchase behavior of the customers, under the booking control based on the booking limits derived by the mathematical programming model and different control policies. In the numerical experiment, the revenues for different control policies under various conditions are analyzed. Based on the experiment results, it can be found that the booking control based on the model developed in this study can lead to higher revenue than the simply first-come-first-served (FCFS) control, and the gap between them is in general about 3%. |
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