Revenue Management in High-Density Urban Parking Districts: Modeling and Evaluation

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Date
2010-01-22
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Publisher
Virginia Tech
Abstract

This thesis explores how revenue management (RM) principles would integrate into a parking system, and how advanced reservation-making, coupled with dynamic pricing (based on booking limits) could be used to maximize parking revenue. Detailed here is a comprehensive RM strategy for the parking industry, and an integer programming formulation that maximizes parking revenue over a system of garages is presented. Furthermore, an intelligent parking reservation model is developed that uses an artificial neural network procedure for online reservation decision-making.

Next, the work evaluates whether the implementation of a parking RM system in a dense urban parking district (and thus avoiding "trial-and-error" behaviors exhibited by drivers) mitigates urban congestion levels. In order to test this hypothesis, a parallel modeling structure was developed that uses a real-time decision-making model that either accepts or rejects requests for parking via a back-propagation neural network. Coupled with the real-time decision-making model is a micro-simulation model structure used to evaluate the policy's effects on network performance. It is clear from the results that the rate at which parkers renege is a primary determinant of the value of the implementation of RM. All other things being equal, the RM model in which the majority of parkers is directed to their precise parking spot via the most direct route is much more robust to the random elements within the network that can instigate extreme congestion.

The thesis then moves from micro-evaluation to macro-evaluation by measuring the performance of the urban parking system from the perspective of the set of relevant stakeholders using the hyperbolic DEA model within the context of the matrix DEA construct. The stakeholder models, including that of the provider, the user, and the community, have defined inputs/outputs to the hyperbolic DEA model, which allows for the inclusion of undesirable outputs such as network delay and incidence of extreme congestion. Another key contribution of this work is that of identifying design issues for current and future dense urban parking districts. Clearly, reneging rate and the tenacity of perspective parkers is a key consideration in cases where RM policy is not implemented.

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Keywords
Hyperbolic DEA, Matrix DEA, Stakeholder models, Performance measurement, Data Envelopment Analysis, Integer programming, Micro-simulation, Yield management, Revenue management, Artificial neural networks, Operations research, Intelligent parking systems, Transportation demand management
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