Insourcing the Passenger Demand Forecasting System for Revenue Management at DB Fernverkehr: Lessons Learned from the First Year

摘要

The long-distance traffic division of Deutsche Bahn (DB) uses a revenue management system to sell train-tickets to more than 140 million passengers per year. One essential component of a successful Railway Revenue Management system is an accurate forecast of future demand. To benefit from a tighter integration, DB decided in 2017 to develop its own forecast environment PAUL (Prognose AUsLastung) to replace the legacy third-party forecasting system. This paper presents the conceptual and technical setup of PAUL. Furthermore, experiences of the first year using PAUL as a production forecast environment are presented: It turned out that PAUL has a higher forecasting quality than the predecessor system and that the insourcing led to a constructive collaboration of PAUL system experts and revenue managers, which is beneficial for identifying opportunities for improvement.