Multi-level pricing and slot inventory control for China Railway Express considering time value
The rapid growth in transport demand for China Railway Express has led to a long peak season and shortage of transport capacity.Some time-sensitive goods cannot wait long and are divert-ed to other modes of transport.To meet the transport demand for time-sensitive goods,in this study,a multi-level pricing scheme was proposed considering the time value of goods,and a dynamic slot inventory control model considering the choice behavior of goods owners was established to maxi-mize the revenue of train operation enterprises.Because of the multi-dimensional state space,it is dif-ficult to obtain an exact solution for the model.Therefore,the dynamic programming model was ap-proximately solved using the value function approximation method,and the least squares approxi-mate policy iteration algorithm was adopted to calibrate the parameters of the linear and piecewise linear approximation value functions.Applying the learned parameters,simulation experiments were performed to compare the revenue performance and slot booking status of the two value function ap-proximation methods with those of"first-come first-served scheme under benchmark price"and"first-come first-served scheme under multi-level pricing".The results show that under the scenario of short supply in the peak demand season,the slot inventory control strategy based on multi-level pricing proposed in this paper can allocate limited capacity to customers most in need,while simulta-neously effectively improving the transportation revenue of railway enterprises,among which the piecewise linear approximation method has a better effect on revenue improvement.
railway transportationmulti-level pricingdynamic slot inventory controltime value of goodschoice behavior
万方数据
维普
