Nested Seat Inventory Control Approach for High-speed Trains

Nowadays in China,tickets for most high-speed trains are subjected to sharing over the line between origin and destination from the dates of booking,and the"First-Come-First-Served(FCFS)"rule was employed in the tickets reservation system.However,since travel demand may exceed ticket supply locally,the FCFS rule may result in a phenomenon that long-journey passengers lose their chances to purchase tickets because those tickets have been occupied earlier by short-journey passengers due to lack of appropriate ticketing control measures.It is seen that the traffic capacity may be wasted and revenue losses may be caused.To solve these problems,this paper put forward a"nested seat inventory control"mathematical model to allocate tickets.In this model,the long-journey OD(Origin-Destination)demand can be protected by overlaping the short-journey OD capacity.The ant colony algorithm was designed to solve the model.The model and algorithm were verified by a numerical example.The results illustrate that the model and algorithm are feasible.