考量預售折扣與選擇行為的鐵路座位配置模式

Abstract

鐵路成為運輸業的重要運具已有多年歷史，其永續性更受到許多政府及組織的青睞。也因此透過技術的發展以及大量資源的投入，許多鐵路系統的速率與容量陸續獲得提升。然而，鐵路系統營運面的管理技術卻相對較少受到重視。尤其，不像航空公司擁有精緻的營收管理系統來大幅增加營收，鐵路公司對於透過營收管理來進行市場區隔與差別定價時的態度則較為保守。而且，目前也沒有太多的研究去評估營收管理在鐵路的效能，並進而發展更合適的決策模式。 本研究目標在於針對一個具有多重起訖區間之鐵路班次發展一控管座位銷售的模式，而其中一個重要的複雜度在於此等多重起訖區間共用同一列車的容量。此外，由於需求具有本質上的隨機性，使得本研究比起傳統的單純座位配置模式更加具備挑戰性。最後，基於預購折扣機制的實施，旅客對折扣車票選擇的行為、及所衍生的需求相關性，也都必須納入座位控管的決策模式中。 本研究發展了數個靜態的線性規劃模式以產生銷售座位時控管的決策，來因應具有不確定性、相關性、及異質性等特性的鐵路需求。並設計各種情境，模擬不同模式之控管決策在各種情境下的收益結果，以驗證所發展之模式和求解方法的可用性。 根據數值測試的結果，同時考慮需求不確定性以及購票行為異質性的整合模式，是最具有優勢的模式。根據不同的情境，其比起其他座位控管決策模式的收益結果高了0.2%~21.2%，證明整合模式的確有助於改善了高速鐵路系統的收益情形。

Railways have been an important mode of transportation for years, and it is mostly preferred by many governments and organizations from the aspect of sustainability. Thus, the speed and capacity of many railway systems has been upgraded, due to the development of technology and the investment of massive resources. However, relatively less attention has been paid to the management skills and techniques of operating railway systems. In particular, unlike the airline industry with sophisticated revenue management (RM) systems to generate considerable extra revenue, the railway industry tends to conservative about implementing RM to exercises market segmentation and price differentiation. Meanwhile, not much research work has been done to evaluate the effectiveness of RM in the rail industry and develop suitable models to provide better decision support. This study aims to develop the decision model for seat inventory control about a railway system with multiple original-destination (OD) pairs sharing the train system capacity. Due the instinct stochastic feature of railway demand, this decision model is more complicated when compared with the traditional simple seat allocation model. In particular, give the introduction of the advanced purchase discount, the associated choice behavior of travelers and demand dependency must be taken into account in the decision models. This study develops several static linear programming (LP) models that can generate the control decisions capable of dealing with uncertain, heterogeneous, and inter-dependent demand. Moreover, different scenarios are designed in the simulation experiment to validate the applicability of the developed models and solution approaches, based on these simulated revenues. Based on the numerical experiment, the integrated model, which considers heterogeneous and uncertain of demand, has the best revenue outcome. Its revenues are higher than the revenues of other models by 0.2% to 21.2%. This promising result proves that the integrated model is helpful for improving the revenue in a railway system.