Research On Railway Passenger Ticket Pricing Based On Passenger Demand

Nowadays, China's railway is in a period of rapid development, and has made remarkable achievements in all fields of railway construction, operation and so on. But the railway transportation in our country is basically in a state of complete monopoly, and the state is very strict to the railway ticket price. The government has the authority to price the ticket during the current system of railway ticket price and the current system of railway ticket price shows many problems during the implementation. The traditional cost plus pricing method can not accurately grasp the trend of market demand, so that the railway transport enterprise in the competition is often in a disadvantageous position. On the other hand, railway investment and construction cost is huge, at the same time, the railway passenger transport is facing the competition from the aviation, highway and other fields. So how to reverse this passive situation and gain more revenue has become an important issue in the development of railway construction and operation in China. This paper regards the pricing problem of China railway transportation product as the research object with considering passenger demand alteration, and hopes to develop a pricing model of the railway passenger transport which can max the gain of enterprise and can be generally acceptable to the public.Firstly, this paper analyzes China's current railway passenger ticket pricing system, comparative analysis the railway passenger ticket pricing strategies of developed countries proposes the main problems existed in our current ticket pricing system, and then introduces the application of the bi-level programming model in the railway passenger ticket pricing problem. Then this paper establishes a bi-level programming pricing model based on passenger demand according to the conflict of interest between passengers and the railway operators. The lower level programming model is about the problem of passenger demand, and this paper converts the passenger travel choice behavior to the path assignment problem. The main constraint condition is the capacity of railway passenger transport. The upper level programming model is about the optimal pricing problem, and ticket pricing is based on the different train services offered by the railway. The main constraint condition is the range of fare adjustment. And then this paper designs the algorithm based on the sensitivity analysis. The upper model is solved by Hooke and Jeeve s' Method and the lower model is solved by Bregmen's Balancing Method. Finally, this paper offers the initial data and parameters of the model, and then we knowledges the optimal pricing and the passenger travel choice behaviors under the optimal pricing by solving the model, as well as the optimal objective function value. This paper verifies the versatility of the constructed bi-level programming pricing model and the feasibility of solving algorithm.