An efficient computational approach for railway booking problems

This paper deals with the determination of seat allocations for a rail booking system. It is assumed that demand for each trip in the network can be divided into two segments, namely a full fare segment and a discounted fare segment. A constrained nonlinear integer programming model is formulated to deal with this problem. The purpose of this paper is to develop an efficient heuristic approach to develop the booking limits for all ticket types in the railway network. The solutions obtained by the heuristic approach are compared with those found by the Lingo software and the DICOPT solver. Numerical results show that the proposed heuristic approach only require a small number of CPU time to obtain superior solutions.