Research On Floating Method Of The Railway Freight Rate Oriented To Market Demand

With the social economic development, various transportation modes are developing rapidly, but the market share of rail freight is showing downward trend. June 15,2013, the China Railway began to implement reform, marking rail transport was really heading to the market. In this trend, accelerating the reform of railway rate and financing, establishing and improving welfare policy and transport subsidy mechanism, deepening the reform of the railway companies, will be very important. Under the current system, the management authority of railway freight rate is strict controlled by our government. Its main objective is to maximize social welfare. This freight rate mechanism is obviously important for social economic development and transportation of key commodity in the planned economy era, but it is difficult to adapt to the current market demand under the competition of multiple transportation mode. The national development and reform commission issued a notice in April 1,2014. Railway freight rate regulated by the market after the opening and operation of ZhunChi railway. The specific freight rate levels is consulted by railway transportation enterprise, cargo owners and others. It marks the key step of rail freight rate heading to full liberalization.Firstly, based on the analysis of related theory about railway freight rate, The thesis summarizes research scholars at different periods. By drawing on foreign, it puts forward some implications for the reform and development of China’s railway. Secondly, it compares and analyzes the changes in freight rate mechanism, and points out the necessity and feasibility of the introduction of rail freight rate floating mechanism at the present stage. Thirdly, it uses PEST and SWOT analyzing factors that affect railway freight rate from macro and micro aspects. Then, the thesis points the main problems currently existing in railway freight rate. The problems include formation mechanism, constitute system and management system. It proves freight rate should be based on market supply and demand, and railway transportation enterprise could autonomously adjust and make freight rate to a certain extent. Fourthly, the thesis quantifies transport mode choice behavior of cargo owners by selecting the economy, timeliness and safety. Through the price elasticity of demand theory, it computes adjustment of railway freight rate under different conditions of elasticity. Fifthly, it balances the interests of both railway transportation enterprise and cargo owners, and constructs bi-level programming model of railway freight rate. The upper level takes income maximization of railway transportation enterprise as objective function, and the lower level takes the minimum of cargo owner’s generalized transportation costs as objective function. At the same time, by adding the virtual mode of transportation, elasticity of demand is transformed into a fixed demand issues in the lower level. Then a heuristic algorithm based on sensitivity analysis is designed. Finally, select one railway administration as a case analysis. By analyzing and calculating the related data, this thesis gets the best freight rate of railway administration in one OD, then verifies the feasibility of the model. However, there are some business risks and limitations in the model. Such as dynamic monitoring of market information, demand function, etc. All of these need scholars further studying.