Price Competition Models for the Railway System

摘要

Coexistence of the high-speed railroad (HSR) the conventional railroad (CR) and other intercity modes in a common transportation corridor creates competition and the opportunities of integration between them Firstly considering competition between HSR and CR and then extending to competition among all modes this study presents a competition model that captures the short-term competition among multiple transportation carriers providing services between two middle-distance cities and carrying a given number of passengers This competition model with the flexibility of including competition between carriers providing substitute and/or integrated services and the various setting of passengers’ and carriers’ attributes has four major components: (1) a transportation system model where passenger carriers are described by combinations of attributes; (2) a pricing model that captures how the carriers simultaneously determine their prices to gain competitive advantage; (3) a passenger choice behavior model that represents how passengers respond to prices; and (4) profit functions that define the relationship between each carrier’s price market share and profit The proposed heuristic provides the solutions for the price equilibrium A set of numerical examples derived from the intercity public transport market in Taiwan are used to demonstrate the model as well as the heuristic followed by the analysis of the sensitivity of the equilibrium with regard to passengers’ average value of time The computational results are in line with the expectations In the appendix this study concerns the efficiency of railway by preliminarily investigating the crew scheduling problem in the rapid transit system The focus is to develop a very large scale neighborhood search heuristic to optimize the crew scheduling problem The proposed heuristic applies a network flows-based improvement algorithm and defines a neighborhood structure to find the minimum cost assignment efficiently Numerical examples based on real data of the Kaohsiung Rapid Transit Corporation reveal that the model reflects the tradeoff between managerial objectives and the drivers’ preferences and the proposed heuristic is able to generate duties with good quality

獎項日期	2014 5月 26
原文	English
監督員	Yusin Lee (Supervisor)