Capacity control in network revenue management : clustering and risk-aversion

[摘要] Network revenue management is the practice of using optimal decision policies to increase revenues by controlling limited quantities of multiple resources;; availability and prices over finite time. It is widely practiced in capacity-constrained service industries such as the airlines, hotels, car rentals, and cruise-lines. A variety of control methods has been introduced for network resource capacity control problem. We propose a clustering method to improve approximation quality. By clustering the legs of the network, one can find tighter upperbound than leg-wise decomposition with loss of computation speed due to larger state space. We have shown that there is more than 6% revenue improvement opportunity by finding the right clustering. With local interchange heuristic and generic heuristics, finding a locally optimal clustering can be done in faster time. We also introduce risk-aversion in network revenue management. We have investigated risk-aversion on network revenue management and also study the impact of risk-aversion parameters in the optimization model on relative revenue-risk performance.

[发布机构] Massachusetts Institute of Technology