Collaborative Research: Revenue Management for Port Operations and other Multistage Service Systems

该合同将通过提供严格的收入管理解决方案，提高多级服务系统的竞争力，为国家的繁荣和福利做出贡献。由于不同操作阶段之间的相互作用以及对客户缺乏系统状态透明度，此类系统的分析具有挑战性。该项目的重点是港口的收入管理，尽管港口对经济很重要，但这一问题引起的关注有限。该项目将为港口码头业务制定现代收入管理战略，包括靠泊和装卸阶段，更一般地说，将审查多级服务系统的定价政策。该项目的成果将推动港口行业运营的现代化，并促进该行业的数字化。该奖项将支持研究生参与推进研究议程。该项目将开发静态和动态定价政策，使多级服务系统的长期平均利润最大化，客户对价格和拥堵敏感。该项目根据客户可获得的信息考虑可观察和不可观察的服务系统。该项目将为服务提供商提供工具，以决定向潜在客户提供哪些信息，并评估动态定价相对于简单的静态定价的好处。该项目将涉及开发精确和近似算法，以确定从业者可以用来解决广泛的现实世界问题的最佳策略。该项目将使用港口码头运营的案例研究来验证方法，以及码头运营商可以使用哪些方法来建立自己的模型和算法，以获得最佳定价策略。分析结果和数值算法涉及马尔可夫决策过程、样本路径参数、随机比较、矩阵解析方法、变量变化和线性规划。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award will contribute to the Nation's prosperity and welfare by providing rigorous revenue management solutions to improve the competitiveness of multistage service systems. Such systems are challenging to analyze due to the interactions between different stages of operations and the lack of system status transparency to customers. The focus of this project is on revenue management for ports, a problem that has attracted limited attention despite the importance of ports to the economy. This project will develop modern revenue management strategies for port terminal operations that involve both berthing and loading/unloading stages and more generally, will examine pricing policies for multistage service systems. The results of this project will advance the modernization of operations in the port industry and promote the digitalization of the industry. This award will support the involvement of graduate students in advancing the research agenda.This project will develop static and dynamic pricing policies that maximize the long-run average profit of multistage service systems with customers that are price and congestion sensitive. The project considers both observable and unobservable service systems depending on what information is available to customers. The project will provide tools for the service provider to decide what information to provide to potential customers and to assess the benefits of dynamic pricing relative to simpler static pricing. The project will involve the development of exact and approximate algorithms for determining optimal policies that practitioners can use to solve a broad class of real-world problems. The project will use a case study on port terminal operations that will be used to validate the methods and which terminal operators can use to build their own models and algorithms to obtain optimal pricing strategies. The analytical results and numerical algorithms involve Markov decision processes, sample-path arguments, stochastic comparisons, matrix-analytic methods, changes of variables, and linear programming.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.