A self-learning advanced booking model for railway arrival forecasting

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2014

Subject Area

ridership - forecasting, technology - passenger information, technology - ticketing systems, mode - rail

Keywords

Advanced booking model, Booking curve, Case-based reasoning, Arrival forecasting, Revenue management

Abstract

Accurate short-term arrival forecasting is essential information for railway operators to conduct daily operations such as demand management strategies. Conventional time series methods apply historical arrival data which is the accumulation of reservations to project future arrivals. This study aims to utilize reservation data directly and proposes a novel advanced booking model by using the framework of case-based reasoning. The proposed model contains four modules with distinctive functions for similarity evaluation, instance selection, arrival projection, and parameter search. We have the constructed model tested on fourteen daily arrival series and compared its out-of-sample accuracy with that of four traditional benchmarks. The empirical results show that in average the proposed self-learning model may reduce at least 11% of mean square errors (MSE). Moreover, the learning scheme in the model may achieve significant reduction of MSE comparing with performance of other naïve versions.

Rights

Permission to publish the abstract has been given by Elsevier, copyright remains with them.

Comments

Transportation Research Part C Home Page:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0968090X

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