Revenue management in airline operations : booking systems and aircraft maintenance services

Although the principles of Revenue Management (RM) have vaguely been used in business for a long time, an increasing number of organizations are implementing well structured RM systems in the last few decades due to the developments in science and technology, especially in economics, statistics, operations research and computer science. The improvements in information and telecommunication technologies, wide use of Internet, rise of e-commerce and successful supply chain management strategies have enabled organizations to model and solve complex RM problems. This dissertation research concentrates on airlines, the earliest and leading user of RM. Today, airlines face serious financial problems due to the increasing costs and competition. They continuously explore new opportunities especially in terms of RM to make profit and survive. In this study, two problems are analyzed within this scope; airline booking process with adapted options approach and aircraft maintenance order control through RM. First; a new approach, financial options approach, is proposed to sell tickets in airline reservation systems. The options are used to overcome the uncertainty in air travel demand and competitors' actions. The seat inventory control problem is formulated with overbooking and embedded options respectively. Then a simulation study is conducted the potential of using options in airlines booking process. Accordingly, empirical results show that they present an opportunity both to utilize capacity more efficiently and to value seats more precisely compared to overbooking approach. Secondly; a peak load pricing concept is applied for aircraft maintenance order control problem. Aircraft maintenance centers face with peak loads in some seasons and the capacity is underutilized in other seasons. A peak load pricing model is proposed to shift some of the price elastic demand from peak seasons to off-peak seasons to balance demand and supply around the year. A dynamic programming algorithm is developed to solve the model and a code is written in C++. Results show that the model improves both annual capacity loading factors and revenues without causing a discomfort from the perspective of the customers. The details of both studies are presented in this dissertation research. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT

Intelligent based Packet Scheduling Scheme using Internet Protocol/Multi-Protocol Label Switching (IP/MPLS) Technology for 5G. Design and Investigation of Bandwidth Management Technique for Service-Aware Traffic Engineering using Internet Protocol/Multi-Protocol Label Switching (IP/MPLS) for 5G

Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) makes use of traffic engineering (TE) techniques and a variety of protocols to establish pre-determined highly efficient routes in Wide Area Network (WAN). Unlike IP networks in which routing decision has to be made through header analysis on a hop-by-hop basis, MPLS makes use of a short bit sequence that indicates the forwarding equivalence class (FEC) of a packet and utilises a predefined routing table to handle packets of a specific FEC type. Thus header analysis of packets is not required, resulting in lower latency. In addition, packets of similar characteristics can be routed in a consistent manner. For example, packets carrying real-time information can be routed to low latency paths across the networks. Thus the key success to MPLS is to efficiently control and distribute the bandwidth available between applications across the networks. A lot of research effort on bandwidth management in MPLS networks has already been devoted in the past. However, with the imminent roll out of 5G, MPLS is seen as a key technology for mobile backhaul. To cope with the 5G demands of rich, context aware and multimedia-based user applications, more efficient bandwidth management solutions need to be derived. This thesis focuses on the design of bandwidth management algorithms, more specifically QoS scheduling, in MPLS network for 5G mobile backhaul. The aim is to ensure the reliability and the speed of packet transfer across the network. As 5G is expected to greatly improve the user experience with innovative and high quality services, users’ perceived quality of service (QoS) needs to be taken into account when deriving such bandwidth management solutions. QoS expectation from users are often subjective and vague. Thus this thesis proposes the use of fuzzy logic based solution to provide service aware and user-centric bandwidth management in order to satisfy requirements imposed by the network and users. Unfortunately, the disadvantage of fuzzy logic is scalability since dependable fuzzy rules and membership functions increase when the complexity of being modelled increases. To resolve this issue, this thesis proposes the use of neuro-fuzzy to solicit interpretable IF-THEN rules.The algorithms are implemented and tested through NS2 and Matlab simulations. The performance of the algorithms are evaluated and compared with other conventional algorithms in terms of average throughput, delay, reliability, cost, packet loss ratio, and utilization rate. Simulation results show that the neuro-fuzzy based algorithm perform better than fuzzy and other conventional packet scheduling algorithms using IP and IP over MPLS technologies.Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND

Intelligent Circuits and Systems

ICICS-2020 is the third conference initiated by the School of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at Lovely Professional University that explored recent innovations of researchers working for the development of smart and green technologies in the fields of Energy, Electronics, Communications, Computers, and Control. ICICS provides innovators to identify new opportunities for the social and economic benefits of society.　 This conference bridges the gap between academics and R&D institutions, social visionaries, and experts from all strata of society to present their ongoing research activities and foster research relations between them. It provides opportunities for the exchange of new ideas, applications, and experiences in the field of smart technologies and finding global partners for future collaboration. The ICICS-2020 was conducted in two broad categories, Intelligent Circuits & Intelligent Systems and Emerging Technologies in Electrical Engineering

Bowdoin Orient v.103, no.1-23 (1973-1974)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-1970s/1004/thumbnail.jp

2009-2010 Course Catalog

An annual catalog of courses and course descriptions offered at the University of Montana.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/coursecatalogs_asc/1040/thumbnail.jp