Research On Capacity Inventory Control Of Air Cargo

In recent years, with the rapid development of the air cargo market, as well as the logistics market competition continues to intensify, revenue management has become an important means for the airlines to increase profitability and competitiveness. The foreign airlines have already been started applied revenue management techniques to raise the company’s management level, increase company income and win the survival and development market space in future. The capacity inventory control is as the core and important part of the airline revenue management, its reasonable and effective use can not only satisfy customer’s demand of different need, and can achieve the goal of maximizing airline revenue. Therefore, the research of the capacity inventory optimization method is particularly necessary.According to the characteristics of the air cargo market and the indetermination of the goods arrival process, the dynamic program of capacity inventory control is mainly researched for the free sale on the spot market, including the single-leg capacity allocation and the multi-leg capacity allocation problem with the route determined. Firstly, this dissertation analyses the air cargo high-speed development situation and the main problems facing the current air cargo, points out the necessity of research on the air cargo revenue management, summarizes the revenue management in air passenger and cargo research status.Secondly, air cargo revenue management and capacity inventory control is discussed,including the analysis on the characteristics of the air cargo market demand, the structure of the cargo inventory revenue management system, the target of inventory optimization control,and the inventory optimization problem of single-leg and multi-leg. Thirdly, after the analysis of the goods non-homogeneous Poisson arrival process, a single-leg capacity inventory control scheme is build, using the method of Markov decision processes, and then consider the risk aversion of decision makers, a model based on risk aversion is build, combined with the Von Neumann- Morgenstern utility function(VNM function) of expected utility theory.The simulation results show the effectiveness of the algorithm. Finally, to expand the air cargo capacity inventory control model, considering Markov decision process approach based on risk aversion with the traditional seat inventory control methods, the scheme of multi-leg capacity inventory control is set up, which is effectiveness and feasibility by the simulation contrast.