The Impact of Seat Resource Fragmentation on Railway Network Revenue Management

The previous literature of railway revenue management (RM) ignores the negative impact of the problem of fragmented seat resources (PFSR) on passenger transport income. A single train is characterized by continuous transport of multiple segments. Under the condition that a given seat number is assigned to each random arriving customer during the pre-sale period, the remaining seat resource of each rail leg of the train may be distributed on different seats in a fragmented way. When a customer wants to purchase a long-distance transport product, because the remaining seat resource of each rail leg may be not in the same seat, the train cannot provide a service to the customer. This will result in lost customer demand and wasted seat resources. This paper mainly studies the impact of PFSR on railway RM, and a new seat control method is proposed to avoid the revenue loss caused by PFSR. Based on the case study of a real high speed railway (HSR) network, PFSR causes an average revenue loss of 3.95% for passenger transport. The influence of the number of train segments, the size of customer demand and passenger refund rate on PFSR is studied.