Pricing substitutable flights in airline revenue management
Pricing substitutable flights in airline revenue management
复制标题
DOI：
10.1016/j.ejor.2006.10.067
复制
发表时间：
2009-09
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Dan Zhang;William L. Cooper
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Dan Zhang;William L. Cooper
我们开发了一个马尔可夫决策过程制定的一个动态定价问题，多个可替代的航班之间的相同的起源和目的地，考虑到客户的选择航班。由于该模型的多维状态空间和动作空间，使得其精确解在计算上难以处理，因此我们开发并分析了各种边界和算法。我们首先描述了三个相关的模型，每一个都基于某种形式的池，并介绍了这些模型所建议的算法。我们还开发了可分离的界限的价值函数，用于构建价值和政策近似算法。大量的数值实验表明，价值和政策的近似方法，以及在广泛的问题参数，并在大多数情况下优于池为基础的算法。该方法是适用的，即使是大的问题，并在实际应用中是潜在的有用的。
We develop a Markov decision process formulation of a dynamic pricing problem for multiple substitutable flights between the same origin and destination, taking into account customer choice among the flights. The model is rendered computationally intractable for exact solution by its multi-dimensional state and action spaces, so we develop and analyze various bounds and heuristics. We first describe three related models, each based on some form of pooling, and introduce heuristics suggested by these models. We also develop separable bounds for the value function which are used to construct value- and policy-approximation heuristics. Extensive numerical experiments show the value- and policy-approximation approaches to work well across a wide range of problem parameters, and to outperform the pooling-based heuristics in most cases. The methods are applicable even for large problems, and are potentially useful for practical applications.