Abstract
In this paper, we consider the revenue maximization problem of a rail freight transportation company or an intermodal marketing company selling freight transportation services. We propose a revenue management (RM) policy to dynamically accept transportation requests or reject them in favor of some future forecasted transportation demands with higher potential profit. In the proposed load acceptance system, we explicitly take the network structure into account. We analyze solutions obtained from numerical simulations and conclude on the promising results shown by the RM system.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Armstrong A, Meissner J (2010) Railway revenue management: overview and models. Working paper (available at http://www.meiss.com), Lancaster University Management School, 2010
Belobaba P (1987) Airline yield management: an overview of seat inventory control. Transp Sci 21(2):63–73
Bharill R, Rangaraj N (2008) Revenue management in railway operations: a study of the rajdhani express. Indian Railw Transp Res Part A 42(9):1195–1207
Cacchiani V, Caprara A, Toth P (2010) Scheduling extra freight trains on railways networks. Transp Res Part B 44B(2):215–231
Capiez A (2003) Yield management. Hermes Science, Paris
Chiang WC, Chen JCH, Xu X (2007) An overview of research on revenue management: current issues and future research. Int J Revenue Manag 1(1):97–128
Cordeau JF, Toth P, Vigo D (1998) A survey of optimization models for train routing and scheduling. Transp Sci 32(4):380–404
Crainic TG (2009) Service design models for rail intermodal transportation. Innov Distrib Logist Lect Notes Econ Math Syst 619:53–67
Crainic TG, Bilegan IC, Gendreau M (2006) Fleet management for advanced intermodal services—final report, report for Transport Canada, Publication CRT-2006–13. Centre de recherche sur les transports, Université de Montréal, 2006
Crevier B, Cordeau J-F, Savard G (2012) Integrated operations planning and revenue management for rail freight transportation. Transp Res Part B 46(1):100–119
Gao et L, Gorman M (2008) Yield management in freight transportation. Informs Annual Meeting, Washington DC
Godwin T, Gopalan R, Narendran TT (2007) Freight train routing and scheduling in a passenger rail network: computational complexity and the stepwise dispatching heuristic. Asia–Pacific J Oper Res 24(04):499–533
Gorman MF (2005) Reservations, forecasting, yield management and railroads. Informs Annual Meeting, San Francisco
Kuehn J (2011) Yield management \(\sim\) the next advance in rail profitability. Oliver Wyman perspective
Kraft ER (1998) A reservations-based railway network operations management system. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania
Kraft ER (2002) Scheduling railway freight delivery appointments using a bid price approach. Transp Res Part A 36(2):145–165
Kraft ER, Srikar RL, Phillips RL (2000) Revenue management in railroad applications. J Transp Res Forum 39(1):157–176
Lieberman W (2005) Revenue management for the rail industry. Informs Annual Meeting, San Francisco
Talluri KT, van Ryzin GJ (2004) The theory and practice of revenue management. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell
You P-S (2008) An efficient computational approach for railway booking problems. Eur J Oper Res 185(2):811–824
Acknowledgments
The present research work was partly financed by the GDR RO of the CNRS. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of this institution. The authors also thank the reviewers for their accurate observations and suggestions that helped improving the quality of this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bilegan, I.C., Brotcorne, L., Feillet, D. et al. Revenue management for rail container transportation. EURO J Transp Logist 4, 261–283 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13676-014-0051-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13676-014-0051-7