Robust Overbooking Strategy of Railway Cargo Transport

摘要

To solve the revenue management-based overbooking problem of railway cargo transport, an overbooking model with minimizing the expected total cost as the optimization objective is established by considering the influences of the empty wagon distribution on overbooking and the optimal quantity of overbooking is obtained. Considering that the distributing rate of arrival is difficult to precisely evaluate in the actual production, the model is optimized by using the mini-max approach to systematically mitigate the sensitivity of the overbooking policy to the forecast error when only the expectation and variance of distribution is known. Then, the robust quantity of overbooking is obtained and some fundamental properties are given. Finally, a numerical example shows the robustness and the validity of the presented method.