01697307

Component

The profit of rail operators is related to the pricing policy and the operation planning. The operator’s pricing policy affects the demand, and the demand is directly related to the rail operator’s revenue. Bulk of researches tried to optimize the pricing or operation planning strategies separately. As in fact, these two factors are connected with each other. The isolated research on either of them cannot get the optimal profit. In this paper, a bi-level model is proposed, which integrate the pricing and the operation planning, to maximize the profit of rail operators. The lower layer is designed to minimize the customer’s generalized cost, and the top layer is developed to maximize the revenue of rail operators. Simultaneously, the competition from road container transportation is considered in this model. An algorithm based on sensitivity analysis method is designed to solve the bi-level model. Numerical experiments is designed to evaluate the proposed model. The results show that the authors' method can significantly improve the rail operator’s profit in the competition market.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AR040 Standing Committee on Freight Rail Transportation.

19-05281

English

17p

2019

Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

References; Tables

Algorithms; Containerization; Decision making; Freight trains; Planning; Pricing; Sensitivity analysis

Economics; Freight Transportation; Railroads

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2019 Paper #19-05281

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 7 2018 9:23AM