Dynamic slot allocation of railway container trains with batch booking
When customers place batch bookings in railway container transportation,adopting the"First Come First Served"slot management mechanism will easily lead to missing out on the high-value demand for large batches later due to accepting small batches with a low-value demand first,resulting in the loss of high-value customers and increasing the risk of empty slots,thereby affecting the revenue of railway enterprises.To address this issue,a slot-allocation strategy under market seg-mentation,known as a classified management strategy,has been developed.This strategy dynamical-ly divides large and small customers according to the size of the batch,so that the needs of large cus-tomers are directly met,and the needs of small customers are dynamically determined for acceptance is based on the bid price strategy constructed using the revenue management theory.The calculation results indicate that compared to the"First Come First Served"slot management mechanism,using the single management strategy for slot allocation will increase the revenue of railway enterprises by 8.90%.If market segmentation is conducted on this basis and the classified management strategy is adopted,revenue will increase by 9.93%.It can be seen that in the case of batch booking,the classi-fied management strategy is effective in improving the revenue of railway enterprises;further,it is superior to the single management strategy.However,owing to the increased decision-making pro-cess for market segmentation in the classified management strategy,a longer calculation time is re-quired.Finally,considering both revenue performance and computational efficiency,the applicability of the classified management strategy is discussed.
万方数据
维普
