Professor Liu Shaoxuan from Antai's Management Science Department, along with collaborators Zhu, Feng; Wang, Rowan; and Wang, Zizhuo, have successfully published an academic paper in the internationally acclaimed journal of operations management, M&SOM-Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. The paper, titled “Assign-to-Seat: Dynamic Capacity Control for Selling High-Speed Train Tickets,” was featured in the May 2023 issue, Volume 25, Issue 3, on pages 921–938.

Abstract

Problem definition: We consider a revenue management problem that arises from the selling of high-speed train tickets in China. Compared with traditional network revenue management problems, the new feature of our problem is the assign-to-seat restriction. That is, each request, if accepted, must be assigned instantly to a single seat throughout the whole journey, and later adjustment is not allowed. When making decisions, the seller needs to track not only the total seat capacity available, but also the status of each seat. Methodology/results: We build a modified network revenue management model for this problem. First, we study a static problem in which all requests are given. Although the problem is NP-hard in general, we identify conditions for solvability in polynomial time and propose efficient approximation algorithms for general cases. We then introduce a bid-price control policy based on a novel maximal sequence principle. This policy accommodates nonlinearity in bid prices and, as a result, yields a more accurate approximation of the value function than a traditional bid-price control policy does. Finally, we combine a dynamic view of the maximal sequence with the static solution of a primal problem to propose a “re-solving a dynamic primal” policy that can achieve uniformly bounded revenue loss under mild assumptions. Numerical experiments using both synthetic and real data document the advantage of our proposed policies on resource-allocation efficiency. Managerial implications: The results of this study reveal connections between our problem and traditional network revenue management problems. Particularly, we demonstrate that by adaptively using our proposed methods, the impact of the assign-to-seat restriction becomes limited both in theory and practice.

About Professor Liu

Professor Liu Shaoxuan serves as a distinguished faculty member at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he also fulfills roles as the Executive Dean of the SJTU-BOC Institute of Technology & Finance and the Associate Dean of the Antai College of Economics and Management. He earned his PhD in Management from the University of California and has since concentrated his research endeavors in areas such as corporate supply chain management, operational strategy, data-driven operations management and innovation, technology finance, digital transformation, innovation, and transportation policy.

Professor Liu's academic contributions have been recognized and published in numerous prestigious international journals. He has spearheaded various projects sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Education, other national ministries, local governments, and enterprises. As the lead of China’s first Technology Transfer Master’s program, he has demonstrated a profound commitment to education, teaching a variety of courses at the undergraduate, MBA, EMBA, and EE levels. His excellence in teaching has been acknowledged with several awards, including the second prize for National Teaching Achievement, the first prize for Teaching Achievement in Shanghai, and the first prize for Teaching Achievement at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Professor Liu's expertise mainly focuses on supply chain management, operations management, operational strategy, lean operations, digital transformation, innovation, and transportation policy, contributing significantly to both academia and industry.