An Optimization Method for Train Seat Inventory Control

Railway passenger transportation plays a fundamental role in China, reasonable revenue is the guarantee of railway's regularly development such as equipment replacement, technology enhancement, etc. Although many studies on the railway revenue models have been conducted, there is a lack of effective modeling which considers the multiple trains and the multiple levels of seats in real operation. Aiming to improve the revenue of railway transportation industry, this paper proposes a new optimization method for the train seat inventory control problem with the consideration of the multiple trains and the multiple levels of seats. As the in-depth research of this problem, an integer linear programming model is formulated which aims to maximize the total revenue of rail industry. The commercial software MATLAB with CPLEX solver is employed to obtain the approximate optimal solutions. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed approaches are testified by two examples implemented on a simple railway corridor and Wuhan–Guangzhou high-speed railway corridor. Moreover, sensitivity analysis experiments are given to explore the impact on the revenue if the model parameters are changed.