Title
Tractable Open Loop Policies for Joint Overbooking and Capacity Control Over a Single Flight Leg with Multiple Fare Classes
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1287/trsc.1110.0403
Transportation Science
Keywords
Field
DocType
open loop policy,expected penalty cost,capacity control,expected revenue,acceptance probability,multiple fare classes,optimal acceptance probability,single flight leg,optimal policy,joint overbooking,tractable open loop policies,acceptance decision,fixed acceptance probability,fare class,optimal acceptance,revenues,control systems,optimization
Capacity control,Revenue,Revenue management,Mathematical optimization,Control system,Open-loop controller,Optimization problem,Operations management,Mathematics,The Internet
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
46
4
0041-1655
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.44
16
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Huseyin Topaloglu145833.78
S. Ilker Birbil211713.49
J. B. G. Frenk3363.88
Nilay Noyan418413.93