Multiple booking classes available on a given departure within a single compartment of the equipment all share a common inventory of seats. It is the goal of revenue management to increase or maximise the total revenues of the departure by filling those seats with the most profitable mix of customers. This is accomplished by determining the optimal seat allocations or authorised selling levels, per booking class. We begin this module by considering the benefits and dangers of discount seat allocation control and then look at the respective roles of the revenue analyst and computerised revenue management (RM) systems in determining optimal seat allocations. The second section explains the basic methodology used by many leg- or segment-based RM systems to determine seat protection levels. The final section considers the advantages and disadvantages of leg-based seat inventory control.

Audience: Anyone concerned with the science, techniques and ideas of how decisions are made."--BOOK JACKET.

Operations research techniques are extremely important tools for planning airline operations. However, much of the technical literature on airline optimization models is highly specialized and accessible only to a limited audience. Allied to this there is a concern among the operations research community that the materials offered in OR courses at MBA or senior undergraduate business level are too abstract, outdated, and at times irrelevant to today's fast and dynamic airline industry. This book demystifies the operations and scheduling environment, presenting simplified and easy-to-understand models, applied to straightforward and practical examples. After introducing the key issues confronting operations and scheduling within airlines, Airline Operations and Scheduling goes on to provide an objective review of the various optimization models adopted in practice. Each model provides airlines with efficient solutions to a range of scenarios, and is accompanied by case studies similar to those experienced by commercial airlines. Using unique source material and combining interviews with alumni working at operations and scheduling departments of various airlines, this solution-orientated approach has been used on many courses with outstanding feedback. As well as having been comprehensively updated, this second edition of Airline Operations and Scheduling adds new chapters on fuel management systems, baggage handling, aircraft maintenance planning and aircraft boarding strategies. The readership includes graduate and undergraduate business, management, transportation, and engineering students; airlines training and acquainting new recruits with operations planning and scheduling processes; general aviation, flight school, International Air Transport Association (IATA), and International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) training course instructors; executive jet, chartered flight, air-cargo and package delivery companies, and airline consultants.

This book proposes capacity options as a flexible alternative air cargo contract type, and illustrates how capacity can be priced through option contracts. The analysis is accomplished by means of an analytical multivariate optimization model under price and demand uncertainty. A case study using data from a leading German carrier illustrates the financial potential. Finally, the author shows how capacity-option contracts integrate into the context of air cargo revenue management.

A story about science, technology, and people, The Future of Pricing provides an inside look at how airlines price tickets and how practices developed in the airline industry are now revolutionizing the world of pricing. This book is written for business professionals and students wanting to better understand the rapid growth of scientific pricing.

Information Control Problems in Manufacturing 2006 contains the Proceedings of the 12th IFAC Symposium on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing (INCOM'2006). This symposium took place in Saint Etienne, France, on May 17-19 2006. INCOM is a tri-annual event of symposia series organized by IFAC and it is promoted by the IFAC Technical Committee on Manufacturing Plant Control. The purpose of the symposium INCOM'2006 was to offer a forum to present the state-of-the-art in international research and development work, with special emphasis on the applications of optimisation methods, automation and IT technologies in the control of manufacturing plants and the entire supply chain within the enterprise. The symposium stressed the scientific challenges and issues, covering the whole product and processes life cycle, from the design through the manufacturing and maintenance, to the distribution and service. INCOM'2006 Technical Program also included a special event on Innovative Engineering Techniques in Healthcare Delivery. The application of engineering and IT methods in medicine is a rapidly growing field with many opportunities for innovation. The Proceedings are composed of 3 volumes: Volume 1 - Information Systems, Control & Interoperability Volume 2 - Industrial Engineering Volume 3 - Operational Research * 3-volume set, containing 362 carefully reviewed and selected papers * presenting the state-of-the-art in international research and development in Information Control problems in Manufacturing

Over the past thirty-five years, a substantial amount of theoretical and empirical scholarly research has been developed across the discipline domains of Transportation. This research has been synthesized into a systematic handbook that examines the scientific concepts, methods, and principles of this growing and evolving field. The Handbook of Transportation Science outlines the field of transportation as a scientific discipline that transcends transportation technology and methods. Whether by car, truck, airplane - or by a mode of transportation that has not yet been conceived - transportation obeys fundamental properties. The science of transportation defines these properties, and demonstrates how our knowledge of one mode of transportation can be used to explain the behavior of another. Transportation scientists are motivated by the desire to explain spatial interactions that result in movement of people or objects from place to place. Its methodologies draw from physics, operations research, probability and control theory.

Extensively revised and updated edition of the bestselling textbook, provides an overview of recent global airline industry evolution and future challenges Examines the perspectives of the many stakeholders in the global airline industry, including airlines, airports, air traffic services, governments, labor unions, in addition to passengers Describes how these different players have contributed to the evolution of competition in the global airline industry, and the implications for its future evolution Includes many facets of the airline industry not covered elsewhere in any single book, for example, safety and security, labor relations and environmental impacts of aviation Highlights recent developments such as changing airline business models, growth of emerging airlines, plans for modernizing air traffic management, and opportunities offered by new information technologies for ticket distribution Provides detailed data on airline performance and economics updated through 2013

Accurate forecasts are crucial to a revenue management system. Poor estimates of demand lead to inadequate inventory controls and sub-optimal revenue performance. Forecasting for airline revenue management systems is inherently difficult. Competitive actions, seasonal factors, the economic environment, and constant fare changes are a few of the hurdles that must be overcome. In addition, the fact that most of the historical demand data is censored further complicates the problem. This dissertation examines the challenge of forecasting for an airline revenue management system in the presence of censored demand data. This dissertation analyzed the improvement in forecast accuracy that results from estimating demand by unconstraining the censored data. Little research has been done on unconstraining censored data for revenue management systems. Airlines tend to either ignore the problem or use very simple ad hoc methods to deal with it. A literature review explores the current methods for unconstraining censored data. Also, practices borrowed from areas outside of revenue management are adapted to this application. For example, the Expectation-Maximization (EM) and other imputation methods were investigated. These methods are evaluated and tested using simulation and actual airline data. An extension to the EM algorithm that results in a 41% improvement in forecast accuracy is presented.

When solving real-life engineering problems, linguistic information is often encountered that is frequently hard to quantify using "classical" mathematical techniques. This linguistic information represents subjective knowledge. Through the assumptions made by the analyst when forming the mathematical model, the linguistic information is often ignored. On the other hand, a wide range of traffic and transportation engineering parameters are characterized by uncertainty, subjectivity, imprecision, and ambiguity. Human operators, dispatchers, drivers, and passengers use this subjective knowledge or linguistic information on a daily basis when making decisions. Decisions about route choice, mode of transportation, most suitable departure time, or dispatching trucks are made by drivers, passengers, or dispatchers. In each case the decision maker is a human. The environment in which a human expert (human controller) makes decisions is most often complex, making it difficult to formulate a suitable mathematical model. Thus, the development of fuzzy logic systems seems justified in such situations. In certain situations we accept linguistic information much more easily than numerical information. In the same vein, we are perfectly capable of accepting approximate numerical values and making decisions based on them. In a great number of cases we use approximate numerical values exclusively. It should be emphasized that the subjective estimates of different traffic parameters differs from dispatcher to dispatcher, driver to driver, and passenger to passenger.