Title
Joint optimization of pricing and resource allocation in competitive telecommunications networks
Abstract
Yield management techniques have been used by companies in various competitive industrial contexts in order to keep a high level of revenue. With the opening of the telecommunications markets, operators are looking for ways of including competition in their decision process. By analyzing the customers' preferences, the market can be segmented into groups of similar preferences, and offers targeted to a particular market segment. In this paper, we study a problem of revenue management for a network operator offering services on end-to-end markets, while facing competition. We present a natural formulation for this problem that uses bilinear bilevel programming models, similar to those used in the airline industry [Côté et al., J Revenue Pricing Manage 2 (2003), 23–36]. However, such an approach leads to optimization problems that are very difficult to solve exactly on the large scale instances found in the telecommunications industry. To address difficulties solving large problems, we introduce a new alternative formulation for the problem, give a proof of NP-hardness, and propose solution methods related to this formulation. The first one is an exact method based on a branch-and-bound algorithm; then we propose two approximate methods, one based on Lagrangian relaxation, and one based on a concave approximation of the objective function to be maximized. Comparative results are given. We show that this approach is practically efficient and leads to exact solutions for instances of telecommunications networks of a size larger than previously possible. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, Vol. 50(1), 37–49 2007
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1002/net.v50:1
Networks
Keywords
Field
DocType
joint optimization,resource allocation,exact solution,new alternative formulation,exact method,competitive telecommunications network,telecommunications industry,telecommunications market,end-to-end market,telecommunications network,airline industry,natural formulation,large problem,telecommunications,lagrangian relaxation,bilevel programming,pricing,integer programming
Revenue,Revenue management,Mathematical optimization,Telecommunications network,Bilevel optimization,Yield management,Resource allocation,Lagrangian relaxation,Optimization problem,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
50
1
0028-3045
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.56
2
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mustapha Bouhtou17610.12
Guillaume Erbs250.93
Michel Minoux3741100.18