A case-based seat allocation system for airline revenue management

Abstract

Airline companies usually implement revenue management to increase profits. The revenue management can be performed through seat inventory management. The current system to book seats is first-come first-served. This approach tends to sell low-price seats because low-price requests often appear earlier. It also results in low revenue. In this paper, an expected dynamic probability method and a case-based seat allocation system are proposed to enhance the performance of the seat inventory management. Extensive studies are conducted to compare the performance of first-come first-served method, expected dynamic probability method, and case-based decision support system. The result indicates that the case-based seat allocation system outperforms the other methods. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.