A Game Theoretical Pricing Scheme to Allocate the Cost of Empty Railcars to Participating Rail Companies

将空车成本分配给参与铁路公司的博弈论定价方案

• 批准号: 0223158
• 负责人: Wei Hua Lin
• 金额: $ 9.98万
• 依托单位: University of Arizona
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2002
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2002-08-01 至 2005-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0223158&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Game; Theoretical; Pricing; Scheme; Allocate

The railroad industry played an important role in industrialization in the nineteenth century. The industry is characterized by high fixed costs but relatively low variable costs. Today, with the increased level of congestion on national highways and the rapid development in automation and computerization, the potential of the railroad industry is growing again in the service sector of the United States economy. While research on railcar management, such as minimization of the total empty car miles, is very extensive, allocation of the cost incurred from empty miles to a loaded trip, which is an important pricing problem in freight transportation, has not received adequate attention. The existing cost distribution schemes to allocate empty miles to loaded trips do not seem to explicitly take into account the gain and loss incurred in cooperation and, as a result, do not ensure the fairness in all situations. With the rapid development in information technologies in recent years, cooperation at various levels has already become a key factor to success for many service sectors. The objective of this research is to develop a cost-allocation scheme of empty car movements for a large-scale network with many participants. In specific, the cost-allocation scheme to be developed will reflect the level of participation in cooperation, the costs generated before and after cooperation, and the benefits obtained by each participant due to cooperation. The specific research approach adopted in this study is based on game theory. We will also incorporate the network flow theory of vehicular traffic into the study to characterize the costs incurred at various level of cooperation participated by a subset of participants. The advantage and disadvantage of the proposed pricing scheme will be studied under different operation settings, strategies and objectives. Though the proposed research is conducted in the context of the railroad industry, the cost-allocation scheme developed in this study can be applied, with some modifications, to other service sectors such as commercial fleet management, supply chains, and public transportation systems with timed-transfer between different modes.

19世纪，铁路工业在工业化进程中发挥了重要作用。该行业的特点是固定成本较高，但变动成本相对较低。今天，随着国家公路拥堵程度的加剧以及自动化和计算机化的快速发展，铁路行业在美国经济的服务部门中的潜力再次增长。虽然关于轨道车辆管理的研究非常广泛，如空车总里程最小化，但作为货运定价的一个重要问题，空车里程到载重行程的成本分配还没有得到足够的重视。现有的将空载里程分配给载货行程的成本分配方案似乎没有明确考虑到合作中产生的得失，因此并不能确保在所有情况下都是公平的。近年来，随着信息技术的快速发展，各层次的合作已经成为许多服务部门成功的关键因素。本研究的目的是针对一个多参与者的大规模网络，提出一种空车调运的成本分摊方案。具体而言，拟制定的费用分摊方案将反映参与合作的程度、合作前后产生的成本以及每个参与方从合作中获得的好处。本研究采用的具体研究方法是博弈论。我们还将把车辆交通的网络流理论纳入研究，以表征参与者子集参与的不同级别的合作所产生的成本。将在不同的运营环境、策略和目标下研究拟议定价方案的优势和劣势。虽然这项研究是在铁路行业的背景下进行的，但本研究提出的成本分摊方案也可以应用于其他服务部门，如商业车队管理、供应链和在不同模式之间进行定时换乘的公共交通系统。