A dynamic model for railway freight overbooking
来源期刊：中南大学学报(英文版)2015年第8期
论文作者：FENG Fen-ling ZHANG Jia-qi GUO Xiao-feng
文章页码：3257 - 3264
Key words：revenue management; railway freight; overbooking; dynamic model
Abstract: 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.
FENG Fen-ling(冯芬玲), ZHANG Jia-qi(张佳琪), GUO Xiao-feng(郭晓峰)
(School of Traffic and Transportation Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410075, China)
Abstract: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.
Key words:revenue management; railway freight; overbooking; dynamic model
