Using Dynamic Programming Decomposition for Revenue Management with Opaque Products

Opaque products enable service providers to hide specific characteristics of their service fulfillment from the customer until after purchase. Prominent examples include internet-based service providers selling airline tickets without defining details, such as departure time or operating airline, until the booking has been made. Owing to the resulting flexibility in resource utilization, the traditional revenue management process needs to be modified. In this paper, we extend dynamic programming decomposition techniques widely used for traditional revenue management to develop an intuitive capacity control approach that allows for the incorporation of opaque products. In a simulation study, we show that the developed approach significantly outperforms other well-known capacity control approaches adapted to the opaque product setting. Based on the approach, we also provide computational examples of how the share of opaque products as well as the degree of opacity can influence the results

Demand-oriented integrated scheduling for point-to-point airlines

Optimizing an airline schedule usually comprises multiple planning stages. These are the choice of flights to offer (schedule design), the assignment of fleets to flight legs (fleet assignment), and the construction of rotations under consideration of maintenance constraints (aircraft maintenance routing). Moreover, the airline must assign crews to all flights (crew scheduling). Traditionally, either these scheduling stages are considered sequentially or an existing schedule is modified to cope with the arising complexity issue. More recently, some authors have developed models that integrate adjacent stages. In this paper, outcomes of a research project with airline information technology provider Lufthansa Systems are presented. We consider the case of a small to medium-sized point-to-point airline with a homogeneous fleet. Hence, fleet assignment is omitted, which offers the possibility to solve schedule design and aircraft maintenance routing simultaneously. Our approach explicitly accounts for passengers’ return flight demand and for marginal revenues declining with increasing seat capacity, hence, anticipating the effects of capacity control in revenue management systems. To solve the arising integrated mixed-integer problem, a branch-and-price approach and a column generation-based heuristic have been developed. An extensive numerical study, using data from a major European airline provided by Lufthansa Systems, shows that the presented approaches yield high-quality solutions to real-world problem instances within a reasonable time. </jats:p

The administrative career of Atlee Hunt 1901-1910

© 1968 Helen M. DaviesAtlee Arthur Hunt was Secretary of the Department of External Affairs from 1901-1917, Secretary of the Department of Home and Territories from 1917-1921, and Public Service Arbitrator from 1921 until his retirement in 1930. Though in his own day he was regarded as "standing, with Garran, head and shoulders above the other public service chiefs", his career today is remembered by few, whereas the reputation of Sir Robert Garran has, if anything, increased. (From introduction