Abstract

Organizations have successfully used dynamic pricing to optimize revenues for many years, where research and practice have mainly focused on applications with independent, discrete commodities; for example, an airline ticket. In this research we consider applications where the commodity is continuous and the value of the commodity available to sell depends on the combination of previously accepted demand. We focus on vehicle ferries, where the accepted vehicle bookings are packed in lanes in the ferry to leave a usable space for future bookings. Certain combinations of vehicles may result in areas of unusable space, which will affect future revenue. While this application is the focus of the paper, there are numerous industries that face similar challenges including freight and the sale of advertising on television and radio. In this paper, we simultaneously solve the pricing and resource utilization problem to optimality for a discrete set of product types and stochastic demand. Our approach combines a dynamic pricing model with a mixed-integer linear program to optimize the packing. We present results for real-world examples from the ferry industry and discuss extensions to the method to improve the selection of vehicle configurations.

中文翻译：

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优化可变尺寸货物的价格和包装

摘要

多年来，组织已经成功地使用动态定价来优化收入，其中研究和实践主要集中在具有独立，离散商品的应用程序上。例如机票。在这项研究中，我们考虑了商品是连续的且可出售商品的价值取决于先前接受的需求的组合的应用。我们专注于轮渡，在轮渡的行车道中收拾已接受的车辆预订，为将来的预订留出可用的空间。某些车辆组合可能会导致无法使用的区域，从而影响未来的收入。尽管此应用程序是本文的重点，但许多行业都面临类似的挑战，包括货运以及在电视和广播中出售广告。在本文中，我们同时针对一组离散的产品类型和随机需求解决定价和资源利用问题，以实现最优。我们的方法将动态定价模型与混合整数线性程序结合在一起，以优化包装。我们提供了轮渡行业的实际示例结果，并讨论了对方法的扩展，以改进车辆配置的选择。