The Impact of Seat Resource Fragmentation on Railway Network Revenue Management

Xiang Zhao, Xinghua Shan and Jinfei Wu ()
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Xiang Zhao: China Academy of Railway Sciences
Xinghua Shan: China Academy of Railway Sciences
Jinfei Wu: China Academy of Railway Sciences

Networks and Spatial Economics, 2023, vol. 23, issue 1, No 5, 135-177

Abstract: Abstract The previous literature of railway revenue management (RM) ignores the negative impact of the problem of fragmented seat resources (PFSR) on passenger transport income. A single train is characterized by continuous transport of multiple segments. Under the condition that a given seat number is assigned to each random arriving customer during the pre-sale period, the remaining seat resource of each rail leg of the train may be distributed on different seats in a fragmented way. When a customer wants to purchase a long-distance transport product, because the remaining seat resource of each rail leg may be not in the same seat, the train cannot provide a service to the customer. This will result in lost customer demand and wasted seat resources. This paper mainly studies the impact of PFSR on railway RM, and a new seat control method is proposed to avoid the revenue loss caused by PFSR. Based on the case study of a real high speed railway (HSR) network, PFSR causes an average revenue loss of 3.95% for passenger transport. The influence of the number of train segments, the size of customer demand and passenger refund rate on PFSR is studied.

Keywords: Network revenue management; High-speed railway; Seat allocation; Fragmented resources; Dynamic adjustment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1007/s11067-022-09581-w

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