Customer Satisfaction and Company Revenue: A Solution Approach for the Passenger Management on Buses

In this work we investigate the bus group assignment problem considering the maximization of both the revenue derived from the tickets sale and the service level offered to the customers. The service level is defined as the capacity of the company to satisfy customers’ demands by taking into account the seating configuration, i.e. guaranteeing that all the members of the same group are seated close to each other. We propose a dynamic formulation of the problem, then, a linear programming approximation. Furthermore, we implement a booking limit revenue management policy to solve the problem and manage seat inventory. Empirical tests are made in order to compare the performance of the booking limit policy with a first came first served strategy, and a model solution in a context of perfect knowledge of the occurred demand. The computational results show that the booking limit policy performs better than the first came first served strategy and in many cases equals the performance of the perfect knowledge strategy.