Models And Algorithms For The Railway Ticket Pricing Optimization

In our country, railway passenger-ticket price is determined by government without regarding to the competitive market. It is no longer suitable for the railway transportation to compete with other traffic modes. With the rapid development of the highway and civil aviation, the railway traffic should reform its pricing mechanism to deal with the competition situation. That is to say that the railway department should have the appropriate right to decide its ticket price and the price should reflect the competition.Based on the theories and methods about railway passenger ticket pricing, the bi-level programming theory is introduced. According to the advantage of bi-level programming, passengers' choice behavior is considered when determining the ticket price. The heuristic sensitivity-based algorithm is introduced to solve the bi-level programming.This thesis investigated how to determine the ticket price to maximize the railway revenue with the competition of several transportation modes. The main works of this thesis are as follows:1. A bi-level programming model is proposed to describe the problem of Passenger-Ticket Pricing under the condition of multi-mode transportation with elastic demands. The elastic bi-level programming is transformed into a fixed one, and then a corresponding heuristic sensitivity-based algorithm is presented. A simple numerical example is given to illustrate the applications of the model and its solution.2. To describe the relationship of passenger-ticket pricing problem between different kinds of passenger trains, a model composed of two related bi-level programming models is proposed. One bi-level programming model aims to decide railway average ticket price optimizing the consumer surplus. The other is to decide railway ticket prices of different passenger trains. The numerical example illustrates that the model is feasible.3. A bi-level programming model is presented to optimize the railway passenger-ticket pricing and train speeding-up scheme under the condition of a certain fund. A heuristic sensitivity-based algorithm is given to solve the bi-level problem.4. By analyzing the characters of the railway passenger transportation, a new method is proposed to measure the generalized travel cost. A Logit model is used to describe the passenger's mode-choice behavior with the competition of different transportation mode. The optimal railway passenger-ticket price model is presented by considering departing time of the trains.5. A generalized Nash equilibrium model is proposed to describe the game theory problem between the railway department and other transportation corporation. And the price management is analyzed by a numerical example.