A Study On Dynamic Pricing Of Railway Container Transport Under The Carrier Liquidation Reform

In recent years,China’s railway transportation enterprises have been affected by internal factors such as their own technical characteristics,rigid management,and external factors such as fierce competition from various modes of transportation.Their market share has been shrinking with slow growth in rail container traffic.For this reason,the market-oriented reforms of railway freight transportation have been actively carried out to adapt to market changes.Since that,railway carriers have owned more pricing power.As one of those,the carrier liquidation reform is a huge step towards the marketization of railway transportation.However,they will bear the risk of profit and loss alone which originally shared by the enterprises participating in the transportation of goods after that.Under the dual pressure,both accurate understanding of the characteristics of railway freight transportation demand and more aggressive pricing strategies to deal with the risks of operating profit and loss are needed.Taking railway container transportation as the research object,this paper studies the response between demand and price of railway container transportation and its price strategy under the mode of cargo liquidation from the perspective of the carrier enterprises.First of all,this article emphatically analyzed the main contents of the carrier liquidation reform and some important changes brought by it.A brief introducing of the relevant theories on freight demand and price was done with a static demand function model for container transportation proposed.The current status of railway container freight rates and pricingrelated theories was also analyzed briefly.Secondly,this article analyzed the dynamic demand response process of railway container transportation and a dynamic demand response model was proposed,which is based on the price of railway container transportation and the state vector that affects its total demand.This model can be expressed the linear/ Feedforward Neural Network(FNN)model with selecting state vector manually and the Recurrent Neural Network(RNN)/Long Short-Term Memory(LSTM)model with the state vector constructed implicitly.Thirdly,based on the proposed dynamic demand response model of railway container transportation,considering the cost calculation method of carrier liquidation mode,a dynamic pricing model of railway container transportation was established and a step-by-step algorithm combining the neural network model training algorithms and adaptive genetic algorithm was designed to solve this model.Finally,the paper takes some data from Guangzhou Railway Bureau Group Co.,Ltd.to carry out case study.The calculation results indicate that the container transportation volume of Dalang-Chengxiang depends on the information 3 cycles ago,and the RNN and LSTM dynamic demand response models perform better on the test set than the linear and FNN dynamic demand response models.If the carrier adopts original pricing strategy,a negative profit will be gained under the cargo liquidation mode,and after optimizing prices,its profits will increase significantly and turn losses into profits.