A Study Of Freight Cars Allocation Problem For Railway Block Train Revenue Management

In China, the railway transportation has been limited by the line capacity for a long time. It is not unusual that demand cannot be serviced. However, along with the increasing investment from the government, on major corridors, freight transportation lines will no longer share the same tracks with passenger transportation lines, therefore, more service capacity for freight transportation can be expected. At the same time, in order to compete with road and water transportation, the railway department starts emphasizing on the operation of five-scheduled block train and setting discount policy for customers that have large and stable demand. However, in the operational level, customers with different discount rates are often treated equally with small customers, which seems fair, but benefit more on small customers. Another way is to providing large customers the highest priority in the allocation. In this case, the demand from small customers can be rarely satisfied, which lead to the negative public impacts. The urgent and challenging problem is to construct a mechanism to assign the cars in a scientific manner that can consider the tradeoff between fairness and profit.In this thesis, we studied the literatures of revenue management in transportation services. Following a brief introduction of the policy and condition of five-scheduled block train, we analyzed the allocation problem for Chengdu-Shanghai five-scheduled container block train. By employing marginal analysis and integer programming, we build an allocation model and evaluate its effectiveness through experiments. From the comparisons with historical decisions of the operators, the proposed method performs better, in terms of profits and fairness. The application of revenue management model for the allocation of container block train is promising, meanwhile, it has a good potential to be applied in other areas with resource and capacity allocation problem.