Study On Dynamic Pricing Based On Revenue Management Of Container Liner Shipment

With the development of the tendency of large ships of the container liner shipping, transportation associates and electronic information, the container liner shipping industry is increasingly competitive and the room for freight rate growth has been very limited, the trade imbalance caused by empty container reposition cost a lot of manpower, material and financial resources. Therefore many shipping companies are seeking out the methods that can increase revenue, decrease the empty container reposition cost and maximize the profit. It is the basis for applying revenue management to container liner shipping industry. Container revenue management theory, that is, with the combination of slot allocation, pricing and revenue management, through the rational allocation of accommodation in the case of certain freight, carrying high values goods or using discrimination pricing method in the condition of a certain number of accommodations to increase revenue. This article mainly includes the following sections:Firstly, the revenue management’s concept, characteristics was introduced and then gave the concept of the container revenue management. By the comparison with air passenger industry, the feasibility of the application of revenue management in container liner shipping was analyzed.Secondly, analyzing the factors affect the liner shipping revenue through the four aspects of demand, empty container reposition, contract clients and spot market clients.Thirdly, established respectively the slot allocation model for customer’s loaded container shipping and liner’s empty container allocation and transportation in contract market as well as the dynamic pricing model in spot market by two stages. The chance constrained programming and the robust optimization algorithm were designed respectively with regard to the random characteristics of the slot allocation model and the error feature of statistic in the dynamic pricing model. The results of a case study validate that the established models and their algorithms are feasible and effective.Lastly, summarized the main content of the paper and specified the innovation of the paper as well as the issue to be examined.