Efficient compact linear programs for network revenue management

We are concerned with computing bid prices in network revenue management using approximate linear programming. It is well-known that affine value function approximations yield bid prices which are not sensitive to remaining capacity. The analytic reduction to compact linear programs allows the efficient computation of such bid prices. On the other hand, capacity-dependent bid prices can be obtained using separable piecewise linear value function approximations. Even though compact linear programs have been derived for this case also, they are still computationally much more expensive compared to using affine functions. We propose compact linear programs requiring substantially smaller computing times while, simultaneously, significantly improving the performance of capacity-independent bid prices. This simplification is achieved by taking into account remaining capacity only if it becomes scarce. Although our proposed linear programs are relaxations of the unreduced approximate linear programs, we conjecture equivalence and provide according numerical support. We measure the quality of an approximation by the difference between the expected performance of an induced policy and the corresponding theoretical upper bound. Using this paradigm in numerical experiments, we demonstrate the competitiveness of our proposed linear programs

On a piecewise-linear approximation for network revenue management

The network revenue management (RM) problem arises in airline, hotel, media, and other industries where the sale products use multiple resources. It can be formulated as a stochastic dynamic program, but the dynamic program is computationally intractable because of an exponentially large state space, and a number of heuristics have been proposed to approximate its value function. In this paper we show that the piecewise-linear approximation to the network RM dynamic program is tractable; specifically we show that the separation problem of the approximation can be solved as a relatively compact linear program. Moreover, the resulting compact formulation of the approximate dynamic program turns out to be exactly equivalent to the Lagrangian relaxation of the dynamic program, an earlier heuristic method proposed for the same problem. We perform a numerical comparison of solving the problem by generating separating cuts or as our compact linear program. We discuss extensions to versions of the network RM problem with overbooking as well as the difficulties of extending it to the choice model of network revenue RM