Application Of An EMSR-Based Method To Seat Allocation Control For Single-Leg

Because structure of operating costs is of strong rigidity, the main means is to offer discounts to improve load rate if the airlines wants to improve the profit. But offering too much discounting tickets will erode the revenue of high-grade seat gains, and it does harm to the flight revenue. How to improve the flight load rate while not to sell too much discount tickets so as to improve airline revenue is the problem solved by seat allocation control mechanism.Seat allocation control mechanism can be divided into two kinds,which is based on the ideas of protecting level and the bid-price.At present, the research on revenue management focused on the control mechanism based on the bid price. The results of the study show that bid-price controls are asymptotically optimal when leg capacities and sales volumes are large. If this condition is not met, the flight revenue of bid-price controls is poor. In order to explore a method that can improve the flight revenue and has lower computational complexity.We consider the capacity control with integrated upgrade decision-making under single-leg scenarios.In this paper,we propose a new heuristic approach that generalizes the idea behind the well-known EMSR procedure to multiple resource types, and build corresponding control mechanism to adapt to dynamic environment.Furthermore, we perform computational experiments to investigate the performance of the new approach compared to other existing capacity control methods---two bid-price controls and a benchmark method.The results show that our approach can significantly outperform benchmark method.