ABSTRACT
The objective of the seat inventory control is to guarantee the seat availability for booking requests for the high-revenue itineraries to maximize the overall revenue of the schedule. For the network-based seat inventory control, a similar nesting mechanism should be developed to avoid the scenario of rejecting extra unexpected high-revenue passengers while there are seats available on flights. The complexity of the seat inventory control problem increases significantly for air carriers that adopt the hub-and-spoke network structure. This chapter talks about the early work for Revenue Management (RM) systems that consider more than one flight includes Ladany and Bedi who develop an optimal decision rule for allocating seats to passengers seeking to fly on a flight with an intermediate stop. Curry describes a mathematical programming and marginal analysis formulation for the network RM problem to generate the distinct bucket allocations for different OD pairs.
