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The Impact of Seat Resource Fragmentation on Railway Network Revenue Management

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Abstract

The previous literature of railway revenue management (RM) ignores the negative impact of the problem of fragmented seat resources (PFSR) on passenger transport income. A single train is characterized by continuous transport of multiple segments. Under the condition that a given seat number is assigned to each random arriving customer during the pre-sale period, the remaining seat resource of each rail leg of the train may be distributed on different seats in a fragmented way. When a customer wants to purchase a long-distance transport product, because the remaining seat resource of each rail leg may be not in the same seat, the train cannot provide a service to the customer. This will result in lost customer demand and wasted seat resources. This paper mainly studies the impact of PFSR on railway RM, and a new seat control method is proposed to avoid the revenue loss caused by PFSR. Based on the case study of a real high speed railway (HSR) network, PFSR causes an average revenue loss of 3.95% for passenger transport. The influence of the number of train segments, the size of customer demand and passenger refund rate on PFSR is studied.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the National Key Research and Development Plan [2020YFF0304101], the National Natural Science Foundation of China [U1434207], the China Railway Science and Technology Research and Development Plan [K2019X022], the Beijing Jingwei Information Technology Co., LTD. Scientific Research Project [DZYF20-02], and the China Academy of Railway Sciences Scientific Research Project [2019YJ120].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computing Technology, China Academy of Railway Sciences, Beijing, 100044, China

    Xiang Zhao, Xinghua Shan & Jinfei Wu

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  1. Xiang Zhao
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  2. Xinghua Shan
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  3. Jinfei Wu
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Correspondence to Jinfei Wu.

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 13 The full name and abbreviation of each station
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Table 14 Randomly generated passenger ticket purchase sequence
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Table 15 Comparison of seat sales results under different schemes
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The customer demand and ticket price of G3

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Fig. 27
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The customer demand and ticket price of G129

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Fig. 28
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The customer demand and ticket price of G307

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Zhao, X., Shan, X. & Wu, J. The Impact of Seat Resource Fragmentation on Railway Network Revenue Management. Netw Spat Econ 23, 135–177 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-022-09581-w

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