Research On The Ticket-Pricing Of High-Speed Railway-Based On The Competition Among Different Transport Models

With the accelerating pace of life, people’s demand for traveling is increasing. As an emerging mode of transportation, high-speed railway is rising sharply in passenger transport market with its features including high-speed, safety, comfort, convenience and etc.. As a result it has intensified the competition in passenger transport market. This paper’s background lies in the fierce competition caused by the fast development of high-speed railway. Being the major competitive determinant of transportation modes, sensible price is one of the key factors of keeping high-speed railway system stable and promoting its healthy development. From the perspective of theoretical research and practical application, it is significant that the strategy and determinations of pricing are well studied.Under the condition of various transportations’market pricing mechanism, this paper builds up a ticket-pricing optimization model based on market competition by analyzing main competitors of high-speed railway, with the purpose of finding out an ideal algorithm of high-speed railway’s best price for different phases, and providing a new method to solve the problem of high-speed railway pricing.Firstly, starting with the general definition and characteristics of transportation price, this paper analyzes the structure of high-speed railway products and the factors of pricing, and summarizes commonly-used theories of pricing, which provides theoretical basis for further study of pricing mechanism.Secondly, this paper focus on the competitiveness of high-speed railway. From the perspectives of economic advantages of high-speed railway techniques and passengers’ traveling choices, factors affecting traveling choices are analyzed with traveling procedure, and good points of high-speed railway compared to other transportations are founded. According to the supply of transportation and passengers’own factors, an utility function model based on characteristics of services is built up, which groups influencing factors as measurement indicators and impact factor indicators. Using the model of Logit, the competitors of high-speed railway under different transportation distances are found out, which is verified by specific numerical examples.Afterwards, based on the study of the relationship between revenue, transportation volume and ticket prices for passengers, taking into account the interests of both passengers and railway companies, a bi-Ievel planning model is established to describe the mechanism of pricing. The objective function of the upper planning has two forms which are based on the two phases of high-speed railway’s development, while the lower planning is established as a flow model with elastic demand affected by expenses. This elastic demand is transferred to fixed demand using the network diagram transformation method by adding excess road sections for demand. Combining improved particle swarm optimization with bi-level planning model, the double iterative algorithm is built up based on improved particle swarm, and the global optimal solution is successively approximated though upper and lower layer iteration.At last, suggestions related to the pricing of high-speed railway are given. Through the practical example of high-speed railway between Chengdu and Chongqing, the feasibility of the theoretical method studied in this paper is proved and the optimal ticket prices for different development phases of high-speed railway between Chengdu and Chongqing is calculated.