ROBUST REVENUE MANAGEMENT WITH LIMITED INFORMATION : THEORY AND EXPERIMENTS

Revenue management (RM) problems with full probabilistic information are well studied. However, as RM practice spreads to new businesses and industries, there are more and more applications where no or only limited information is available. In that respect, it is highly desirable to develop models and methods that rely on less information, and make fewer assumptions about the underlying uncertainty. On the other hand, a decision maker may not only lack data and accurate forecasting in a new application, but he may have objectives (e.g. guarantees on worst-case profits) other than maximizing the average performance of a system. This dissertation focuses on the multi-fare single resource (leg) RM problem with limited information. We only use lower and upper bounds (i.e. a parameter range), instead of any particular probability distribution or random process to characterize an uncertain parameter. We build models that guarantee a certain performance level under all possible realizations within the given bounds. Our methods are based on the regret criterion, where a decision maker compares his performance to a perfect hindsight (offline) performance. We use competitive analysis of online algorithms to derive optimal static booking control policies that either (i) maximize the competitive ratio (equivalent to minimizing the maximum regret) or (ii) minimize the maximum absolute regret. Under either criterion, we obtain closed-form solutions and investigate the properties of optimal policies. We first investigate the basic multi-fare model for booking control, assuming advance reservations are not cancelled and do not become no-shows. The uncertainty in this problem is in the demand for each fare class. We use information on lower and upper bounds of demand for each fare class. We determine optimal static booking policies whose booking limits remain constant throughout the whole booking horizon. We also show how dynamic policies, by adjusting the booking limits at any time based on the bookings already on hand, can be obtained. Then, we integrate overbooking decisions to the basic model. We consider two different models for overbooking. The first one uses limited information on no-shows; again the information being the lower and upper bound on the no-show rate. This is appropriate for situations where there is not enough historical data, e.g. in a new business. The second model differs from the first by assuming the no-show process can be fully characterized with a probabilistic model. If a decision-maker has uncensored historical data, which is often the case in reality, he/she can accurately estimate the probability distribution of no-shows. The overbooking and booking control decisions are made simultaneously in both extended models. We derive static overbooking and booking limits policies in either case. Extensive computational experiments show that the proposed methods that use limited information are very effective and provide consistent and robust results. We also show that the policies produced by our models can be used in combination with traditional ones to enhance the system performance

New capacity allocation policies in revenue management

In this dissertation, we study three emerging problems in revenue management. First problem is about optimal capacity allocation in single-leg airline revenue management with overbooking. We propose new static and dynamic models. The static problems are difficult to solve optimally. Therefore, we introduce approximate models, which provide upper and lower bounds on the optimal expected revenues. In the dynamic case, we propose a model based on two streams of events; the arrivals of booking requests and cancellations. Following the characterization of the optimal policy, we also present the nested structure of the optimal allocations. Second problem is about optimal capacity allocation in the presence of a contingent commitment option. This option has been recently offered by airline systems to provide purchase flexibility to the customers. The problem becomes finding the revenue maximizing policy for contingent commitments and advance bookings. We first propose a dynamic programming model. Since it is computationally intractable, we develop an alternate dynamic model based on geometric approximation. In our numerical study, we investigate the effect of the commitment option on various test instances. In the third problem, we investigate optimal room allocation policies in hotel revenue management. Long-term stays are very common in hotel industry. Therefore, it is crucial to consider allocation of multiple-day capacities when responding to a request. This requirement leads to solving large-scale network problems, which are computationally challenging. Therefore, we work on various decomposition methods to find reservation policies for walk-in and stay-over customers. We also devise solution algorithms to solve large problems efficiently

A maximum entropy approach to the newsvendor problem with partial information

In this paper, we consider the newsvendor model under partial information, i.e., where the demand distribution D is partly unknown. We focus on the classical case where the retailer only knows the expectation and variance of D. The standard approach is then to determine the order quantity using conservative rules such as minimax regret or Scarf's rule. We compute instead the most likely demand distribution in the sense of maximum entropy. We then compare the performance of the maximum entropy approach with minimax regret and Scarf's rule on large samples of randomly drawn demand distributions. We show that the average performance of the maximum entropy approach is considerably better than either alternative, and more surprisingly, that it is in most cases a better hedge against bad results.Newsvendor model; entropy; partial information

Stochastic regret minimization for revenue management problems with nonstationary demands

We study an admission control model in revenue management with nonstationary and correlated demands over a finite discrete time horizon. The arrival probabilities are updated by current available information, that is, past customer arrivals and some other exogenous information. We develop a regret‐based framework, which measures the difference in revenue between a clairvoyant optimal policy that has access to all realizations of randomness a priori and a given feasible policy which does not have access to this future information. This regret minimization framework better spells out the trade‐offs of each accept/reject decision. We proceed using the lens of approximation algorithms to devise a conceptually simple regret‐parity policy. We show the proposed policy achieves 2‐approximation of the optimal policy in terms of total regret for a two‐class problem, and then extend our results to a multiclass problem with a fairness constraint. Our goal in this article is to make progress toward understanding the marriage between stochastic regret minimization and approximation algorithms in the realm of revenue management and dynamic resource allocation. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 63: 433–448, 2016Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135128/1/nav21704.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135128/2/nav21704_am.pd

Principles of Revenue Management and their applications

El Trabajo Fin de Grado consiste en una introducción al concepto de Revenue Management, seguido de las ideas básicas en el uso del Revenue Management. A continuación se exponen algunos modelo utilizados en Revenue Management; y, para finalizar, algunas de las aplicaciones en la industria.Departamento de Organización de Empresas y Comercialización e Investigación de MercadosGrado en Ingeniería en Organización Industria

Predictive models for hotel booking cancellation: a semi-automated analysis of the literature

In reservation-based industries, an accurate booking cancellation forecast is of foremost importance to estimate demand. By combining data science tools and capabilities with human judgement and interpretation, this paper aims to demonstrate how the semiautomatic analysis of the literature can contribute to synthesizing research findings and identify research topics about booking cancellation forecasting. Furthermore, this works aims, by detailing the full experimental procedure of the analysis, to encourage other authors to conduct automated literature analysis as a means to understand current research in their working fields. The data used was obtained through a keyword search in Scopus and Web of Science databases. The methodology presented not only diminishes human bias, but also enhances the fact that data visualisation and text mining techniques facilitate abstraction, expedite analysis, and contribute to the improvement of reviews. Results show that despite the importance of bookings’ cancellation forecast in terms of understanding net demand, improving cancellation, and overbooking policies, further research on the subject is still needed.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

On the optimal control problem for single leg airline revenue management with overbooking

Charging identical seats with different prices is a common practice for airline companies. In that regard one of the main concerns for airline managements is the optimal allocation/partition of the plane capacity between multiple fare classes. This thesis examines the seat allocation problem of airline revenue management and proposes a new model. Due to the occurrence of cancellations and no-shows, we also allow overbooking in order to compensate the revenue loss of empty seats. We study a continuous time model in which the objective is to maximize expected revenue consisting of the fares collected minus the cancellation and overbooking costs. In our model customers arrive according to a nonhomogeneous Poisson process while the time to cancellation of each reservation follows an exponential distribution. An optimal policy is found using dynamic programming and this policy is compared with other policies known in the literature by means of simulation

Dynamic Capacity Control in Air Cargo Revenue Management

This book studies air cargo capacity control problems. The focus is on analyzing decision models with intuitive optimal decisions as well as on developing efficient heuristics and bounds. Three different models are studied: First, a model for steering the availability of cargo space on single legs. Second, a model that simultaneously optimizes the availability of both seats and cargo capacity. Third, a decision model that controls the availability of cargo capacity on a network of flights

Dynamic Capacity Control in Air Cargo Revenue Management

This book studies air cargo capacity control problems. The focus is on analyzing decision models with intuitive optimal decisions as well as on developing efficient heuristics and bounds. Three different models are studied: First, a model for steering the availability of cargo space on single legs. Second, a model that simultaneously optimizes the availability of both seats and cargo capacity. Third, a decision model that controls the availability of cargo capacity on a network of flights

APPLICATIONS OF REVENUE MANAGEMENT IN HEALTHCARE

Most profit oriented organizations are constantly striving to improve their revenues while keeping costs under control, in a continuous effort to meet customers‟ demand. After its proven success in the airline industry, the revenue management approach is implemented today in many industries and organizations that face the challenge of satisfying customers‟ uncertain demand with a relatively fixed amount of resources (Talluri and Van Ryzin 2004). Revenue management has the potential to complement existing scheduling and pricing policies, and help organizations reach important improvements in profitability through a better management of capacity and demand. The work presented in this thesis investigates the use of revenue management techniques in the service sector, when demand for service arrives from several competing customer classes and the amount of resource required to provide service for each customer is stochastic. We look into efficiently allocating a limited resource (i.e., time) among requests for service when facing variable resource usage per request, by deciding on the amount of resource to be protected for each customer and surgery class. The capacity allocation policies we develop lead to maximizing the organization‟s expected revenue over the planning horizon, while making no assumption about the order of customers‟ arrival. After the development of the theory in Chapter 3, we show how the mathematical model works by implementing it in the healthcare industry, more specifically in the operating room area, towards protecting time for elective procedures and patient classes. By doing this, we develop advance patient scheduling and capacity allocation policies and apply them to scheduling situations faced by operating rooms to determine optimal time allocations for various types of surgical procedures. The main contribution is the development of the methodology to handle random resource utilization in the context of revenue management, with focus in healthcare. We also develop a heuristics which could be used for larger size problems. We show how the optimal and heuristic-based solutions apply to real-life situations. Both the model and the heuristic find applications in healthcare where demand for service arrives randomly over time from various customer segments, and requires uncertain resource usage per request