Metro Ticket Pricing Strategy Based On Bi-level Programming Model

In order to alleviate the urban traffic pressure caused by population growth,many cities in our country actively implement the public transport priority development strategy,and set off a wave of metro investment and construction.Compared with other public transport modes,metro is more attractive because of its advantages,such as higher speed,volume and punctuality,as well as less land use and pollution.Ticket strategy involves the government,enterprises,passengers' interests.Reasonable ticket pricing strategy will attracts the right amount of passengers,reduces the financial pressure of the metro company and government,and promotes the reasonable sharing of public transport.It is such an important decision-making problem in metro operation and management that it means a lot to the sustainable development of the metro.This paper studies on the metro ticket pricing strategy based on the bi-level programming model under mileage pricing system,which may be a theoretical reference for urban metro to determined reasonable ticket strategy.This paper first analyzes the characteristics of metro,and discusses some representative factors of metro price.Then it discusses the theory and method of ticket pricing in existing research,and summarizes the characteristics and applicable conditions of common metro ticket system,which provides a theoretical basis for the research on reasonable metro ticket pricing strategy.Secondly,considering the characteristics of the metro and the factors that affect the metro fare,it uses the pricing method that covered comprehensive benefits and the relatively equitable mileage pricing system to build a metro ticket bi-level programming model based on elastic demand.The upper level is to maximize the general benefit of the company,namely a weighted sum of the economic benefit and the external benefit.The lower level is to minimize the generalized travel cost of passengers according to a detailed analysis of generalized cost when passengers take the subway.Aiming at the characteristics of the various algorithms in present studies,the process and steps of using the particle swarm algorithm with strong practicability are designed to solve the model.Finally,taking Wuhan Metro Line 2 as an example and considering the pricerelationship with other public transport modes,the optimized results are given using the metro ticket bi-level programming model established in this paper.Then it provides a theoretical ticket strategy adapted to the actual situation that is easier for metro company to operate.The theoretical ticket strategy is compared to the present ticket strategy by evaluation indexes of passengers,society and metro company interests.It also analyzes the influence of the theoretical ticket strategy on the short-distance passenger flow,especially for the river-crossing section of Metro Line2.The feasibility and validity of the model and algorithm are verified,and some practical suggestions are put forward for the metro ticket pricing strategy.