A seat assignment model for high-speed railway ticket booking system with customer preference consideration

ABSTRACTThis paper addresses the railway revenue management problem of homogeneous seats. Within a certain period of time, multiple trains characterized by different train stop plans are alternatives to each other. For homogeneous seats, multiple fare classes are designed based on the customer preference orders of different customer types. A seat inventory control method is developed based on characteristics of the China high-speed railway (HSR). In addition, an efficient heuristic approach is proposed to solve the nonlinear integer programming model of the HSR revenue management problem. The Beijing-Shanghai HSR is taken as a case study. Numerical examples show that revenue can be increased by reasonably controlling the deterministic booking limits of different fare classes according to customer preference orders. Furthermore, our method can increase the total revenue by optimizing the resources of multiple trains with different train stop plans.