PASSENGER ASSIGNMENT AND PRICING STRATEGY FOR A PASSENGER RAILWAY TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM

Abstract

We investigate the railway passenger pricing problem in which a railway company adjusts its ticket prices to affect passengers’ choices so that the system’s performance can be optimized Passengers in the railway system make their route choices selfishly to minimize their generalized costs To capture passenger choices a space time expense network (STEN) is generated according to published timetables and a model based on the user equilibrium principle widely used in roadway traffic is developed Due to the design of the STEN the difficult second-best congestion pricing in such railway systems is as straightforward as the first-best congestion pricing A descent direction based heuristic is proposed to determine the optimal pricing scheme in an efficient manner Numerical results demonstrate that the resulting pricing strategy can drive the system to its best performance by changing passenger choices The empirical results also show that a railway company only needs to modestly adjust its pricing structure to achieve optimal system performance

Date of Award	2015 Jul 28
Original language	English
Supervisor	Dung-Ying Lin (Supervisor)