Self Storage (self-storage) Based On Column Generation Algorithm Earnings Optimization Decisions

Self-storage is a booming industry which has received little academic attention so far.In US,about 1 in 10 households currently rent a self-storage unit.The average lease term is about 13.4 months.This paper considers a self-storage company,facing a set of reservations for storage units over a certain time horizon with revenue rewards. The company has to decide which storage requests to accept to maximize revenue. This paper emphasizes the most general and the most complex case in which each order reservation may request multiple storage units of different storage types.This paper model the problem as a binary integer programming.Considering the huge size of the integer programming and the advantage of Column Generation algorithm in solving huge linear programming,the author decided to choose column generation to solve this problem.According to specific structure of the model,this paper proposed the appropriate column generation algorithm combined with the traditional simplex algorithm,Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition and branch-and-bound strategy.The author then programmed this algorithm by using MATLAB software (See appendix).Two computational experiments were made to test the veracity and validity of the algorithm.The experiments proved that this algorithm can efficiently solve the problem,besides,this algorithm can save much time when comparing to improved simplex algorithm and dual simplex algorithm.The huger the programming is,the more prominent the advantage will be.