Study On Air Cargo Transportation Network Optimization And Cargo Space Differential Pricing Decision

In recent years,China’s air cargo transportation demand has increased gradually.Air cargo transportation businesses have expanded rapidly and the competition among air cargo transportation companies is becoming increasingly fierce.Facing this rapidly expanding freight demand and fiercely competitive market,it is necessart for air cargo transportation companies to optimize operational plans from two aspects of reducing costs and increasing income,and improve their profit.In case the transport demand is determined,the profit of a company can be improved by controlling costs.Therefore,air cargo transportation companies need to plann sapce supply,optimize transport networks and cargo delivery schemes with the objective of minimize the operating costs.On the other hand,in the case of transport demand changes with service prices,air cargo transportation companies should divide the sales periods into consecutive multiple time periods to determine the allocation of space and sales price at each period with the objective of maximizing operating profit.The content based on above background is as follows:1)Based on the case that air cargo transportation companies mixed use passenger aircraft bellies and cargo aircrafts to provide transport service.Based on air cargo transport demand,a bi-level programming model is constructed.In the upper model,the transportation network and the transportation capacity is optimized with the objective of minimize the total transport cost of cargo transportation companies.In the lower model,quilibrium cargo flow on each link is calculated.From the feedbacks between the upper model and lower model,the segments of cargo aircrafts,the hubs airports and the transport paths of the cargos between each OD pair when supply and demand balance can be get.The 14 cities served by ShunFeng Company is selected as a case for the case study.The results show that both hubs and non-hubs may transship cargos for other airports in the mixed network.In addition,both the two airport with short distance in the certarl region can be selected as hubs,the purpose is to transship large amount of cargos gathering in the central.2)Based on the same bi-level programming model,considered the characteristic that shippers have some tolerance(time tolerance)on the delivery time of cargos,the constraint of"Fist Come First Serve" is relaxed.Within the time tolerance.dynamically matching space and the cargos arriving during the corresponding time periods,to achieve the flexible deployment of transport resources and minimize transport costs.The results of case study show that the total cost decreases along with the tolerance increment,while the total time increases,which indicates that the FCFS mode can reduce transport time but may lead to higher transport costs.Therefore,in order to save costs,air cargo transportation companies should take advantage of time tolerance and try to use a non-FCFS operating mode.3)According to the characteristics of air transportation timeliness,the 10 days before the flight is taken as the sales periods of spot market,and one day is taken as a sales period based on the occurrence regular of cargos.Based on the characteristic that the potential market demand and the sensitivity of the cargo owners to the change of space price are different in different sales periods,the price and the amount of space at each sales period are taken as decision variables.The single segment with two companies competing with each other is taken as the target market.A revenue management model is built to optimize the space price of the two companies at different sales periods and to determine the corresponding amount of sales space.The case that two cargo transportation companies,Dalian airport and China Southern Airlines,on the segment of Dalian-Guangzhou is selected for the case study.The results shows that the adopting differential pricing space selling strategy can obtain more revenues in the spot market.The closer the price elasticity and cross-price elasticity of the booking demand is,the larger room for them to raise prices.