Tractable open loop policies for joint overbooking and capacity control over a single flight leg with multiple fare classes

Topaloğlu, Hüseyin and Birbil, Ş. İlker and Frenk, Hans and Noyan, Nilay (2012) Tractable open loop policies for joint overbooking and capacity control over a single flight leg with multiple fare classes. Transportation Science, 46 (4). pp. 460-481. ISSN 0041-1655 (Print) 1526-5447 (Online)

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Abstract

In this paper, we consider the joint overbooking and capacity control problem over a single flight leg with multiple fare classes. The objective is to maximize the net expected revenue, which is given by the difference between the expected revenue from the accepted requests and the expected penalty cost from the denied reservations. We study a class of open loop policies that accept the requests for each fare class with a fixed acceptance probability. In this case, the challenge becomes finding a set of acceptance probabilities that maximize the net expected revenue. We derive a simple expression that can be used to compute the optimal acceptance probabilities, despite the problem of finding the optimal acceptance probabilities being a high dimensional optimization problem. We show that the optimal acceptance probabilities randomize the acceptance decisions for at most one fare class, indicating that the randomized nature of our open loop policies is not a huge practical concern. We bound the performance loss of our open loop policies when compared with the optimal policy. Computational experiments demonstrate that open loop policies perform remarkably well, providing net expected revenues within two percent of the optimal on average.
Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: revenue management; overbooking; single leg
Subjects: T Technology > T Technology (General) > T055.4-60.8 Industrial engineering. Management engineering
T Technology > T Technology (General) > T055.4-60.8 Industrial engineering. Management engineering > T57.6-57.97 Operations research. Systems analysis
Divisions: Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences > Academic programs > Manufacturing Systems Eng.
Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences
Depositing User: Nilay Noyan
Date Deposited: 08 Dec 2012 15:35
Last Modified: 31 Jul 2019 15:18
URI: https://research.sabanciuniv.edu/id/eprint/20483

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