Economics of secondary queue of Indian railways passenger reservation system: a queueing science approach

S. M. Qasim () and Jamal A. Farooquie
Additional contact information
S. M. Qasim: Master of Business Administration Institute of Engineering and Technology
Jamal A. Farooquie: Aligarh Muslim University

OPSEARCH, 2024, vol. 61, issue 4, No 4, 1795-1824

Abstract: Abstract Reservation systems permit a potential customer to book and pay for a service for the slot in advance. These potential customers are allowed to surrender their services due to unforeseen conditions. Overbooking is preferred in such a situation to save the system from idleness. Studies designated queue formations in overbooking as secondary queues. Such secondary queue performance measures with the data-driven approach for a single class of train of Indian Railways have been studied statistically for a better understanding of arrival and service rate to choose an appropriate queueing model. Further, an attempt has been made for what-if analysis by arbitrarily increasing and decreasing the system’s current state to better estimate the effect on revenue loss due to the overbooking threshold. The economic analyses in the light of queueing science with two economic facets (i) revenue lost due to inadequate waiting capacity resulting in reneging and balking and (ii) the burden of cost for having additional channels to reduce these phenomenon has been analysed. It is found that either railway has to increase the fare (estimated in the study) to bring in breakeven or change the design of the secondary queue of the existing system to reduce the loss.

Keywords: Secondary queue; Railway reservation system; Revenue optimisation; Queueing science (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12597-024-00755-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:opsear:v:61:y:2024:i:4:d:10.1007_s12597-024-00755-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... search/journal/12597

DOI: 10.1007/s12597-024-00755-3

Access Statistics for this article

OPSEARCH is currently edited by Birendra Mandal

More articles in OPSEARCH from Springer, Operational Research Society of India
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().