关键词: 交通运输经济, 收益管理, 高速铁路, 灵活车票, 席位存量控制, COPT

Abstract: Considering the unbalanced passenger flow distribution between parallel high-speed trains, this paper proposes a flexible ticketing method that considers passenger travel characteristics to alleviate pressure on benchmark train transport and to enhance overall ticket revenue and seat utilization rates. Flexible ticket is a new form of ticket system with lower prices and only a set of alternative train numbers are determined when sold, which has specific train numbers and seats being redeemed at a certain time before train departure. The departure time preference of passenger and the time value of flexible ticket delays are integrated into the passenger's choice of the generalized cost function. Based on the demand elasticity function, this paper introduces a passenger selection behavior model to evaluate the passenger flow allocation rate of each train. The model selects certain trains to offer flexible tickets on specific origin destination (OD) routes and develops an activation and cash model aimed at maximizing ticket revenue. The ticket allocation between non-alternative and alternative trains on each OD route is determined at various percentage stages as the decision variable. The model constrains include seat availability, train service section limitations and flexible ticket activation and redemption, which are established and resolved using Cardinal Optimizer (COPT). This paper used several trains on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway to verify the model feasibility and effectiveness. The results indicate that the proposed method can quantify the ticket sales process from the supply and demand matching, which is not affected by spatiotemporal factors and passenger arrival probability. The method has high adaptability in the activation and redemption problem of flexible tickets. The discount of flexible tickets, the proportion coefficient of flexible tickets in the same percentage stage, the activation percentage stage, are key factors affecting the final return of passenger tickets. Properly increasing the activation and redemption frequency of flexible tickets can further improve ticket revenue. Under the condition of single point cashing activation, the maximum revenue increase is 4.84%, while under the condition of double point cashing activation, the maximum revenue increase was 5.38%.

Key words: transportation economy, revenue management, high-speed railway, flexible ticket, seat inventory control; COPT