A Joint Decision Strategy For Ticket Pricing And Stop Plan Of High-speed Railways

The high-speed railway(HSR)has now become the main undertaker of railway passenger transport in China,and its competition with other transport modes is becoming increasingly fierce.However,the market-oriented operation of the HSR is relatively backward in China.The fixed passenger fare mechanism fails to meet the time-varying passenger demand,which seriously affects the service level and transport revenue.As a result,it is difficult to improve the competitiveness of the HSR in the passenger transport market.The government has allowed railway enterprises to determine the ticket price for part of HSR trains independently.Thus,based on the existing research on railway dynamic pricing,studying the joint optimization of dynamic pricing and stop plan for the HSR is beneficial for railway enterprises to effectively utilize HSR resources,and better balance passenger demand and HSR transport supply.This thesis introduces the theory of revenue management.First,the relative research on dynamic pricing and train stop plan of the HSR is analyzed and summarized,and then the research ideas are completed and the overall structure is formed.Next,an in-depth analysis of dynamic pricing,stop plan and their relationship is carried out.After dividing the ticket pre-sale period into multiple stages according to passenger ticket purchase rules,this thesis analyzes the price elasticity characteristics of passenger demand and constructs an elastic passenger demand function.Aiming at maximizing the transport revenue of railway enterprises,the collaborative optimization model of dynamic pricing and train stop plan is built under the constraints of ticket price,train capacity,direct service of OD pairs,etc.At the same time,a bi-level simulated annealing algorithm is designed according to the characteristics of the problem.Finally,the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway is taken for empirical analysis.The results show that under the fixed transport capacity,the optimal joint plan obtained by the proposed method can improve the revenue for railway enterprises by 4.51%,and performs better than that under the joint optimization of dynamic pricing and seat allocation.The dynamic pricing strategy is to set low discount coefficients for the early pre-sale stages to attract more passengers,and set high coefficients for the later stages to adjust the passenger ticketing demand,which effectively increases the ticket revenue while ensuring the service level.The optimized stop plan achieves a better combination of trains’ stopping patterns,satisfying passenger demand and maintaining a high passenger flow level.