Rail Freight Optimization With Simultaneous Price And Capacity Control In The Competitive Environment

It is an important direction of railway freight reform to make full use of railway resources,optimize freight pricing,and improve the competitiveness of railway freight and overall operation benefit.But compared with road and air freight,railway freight has been sluggish in recent years,sometimes even declining,so the situation is grim.Faced with such fierce competition,the railway corporation is eager to improve the rail freight market share and revenue,but it's apparently difficult to achieve by relying on experience to make decisions about pricing and capacity control strategy.Under the market economy,the demand of freight is affected by railway freight pricing,by the same time,the demand determines the capacity control strategy,namely rail freight pricing and capacity control strategy are influenced by each other.An independent optimization of one of these factors may result in the failure to obtain the maximum benefit.Therefore,how to use the scientific revenue management theory to optimize the railway freight pricing and capacity control becomes the focus of railway transportation enterprises.Therefor this paper studies how to simultaneous optimize the railway freight pricing and capacity under competitive environment.At first,combining with the current situation of railway freight transportation in our country,we analyses the feasibility of railway freight revenue management,and make a conclusion that it's basically conform for the railway freight industry to implement revenue management method.On this basis,the related theoretical knowledge and basic model of revenue management are further elaborated.Secondly,based on the analysis of railway freight revenue management,we establish the static network competition game model which is simultaneous optimizing the freight price and capacity allocation with the goal of maximizing the freight revenue.The heuristic algorithm is designed and the model is solved by Matlab.Finally,we provide the pricing and capacity allocation strategy of both competitors.In order to analysis the change of the revenue for railway,we made a comparison of our model and the basic model.We find that it has an absolutely better revenue by using our model.Finally,considering that the railway freight booking is a continuous dynamic process,in this paper,the static simultaneous optimizing rail freight pricing and capacity control model is expanded to the dynamic environment,the differential variational inequality is used to depict the model.Finally,using the fixed-point algorithm,we give the dynamic pricing and capacity allocation of each freight product in the booking period and expected revenue on the consideration of the price competition.It informs the decision-making to the railway enterprise for dynamic adjusting and updating their own strategies to cope with the competitor.