Abstract: Avis Budget EMEA Ltd is a leading car rental company in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Over the last few years the company invested considerable resources in the bespoke design and development of a Revenue Management (RM) Forecasting and Optimisation system to allow Avis to maximise the revenue generated by its fleet of vehicles. The main decisions from the RM system are two levers which control both the supply and demand. One of these is to limit the availability of a certain products so that fleet is saved for more profitable customers. The other is to shuttle cars between rental stations, typically moving cars from areas of low demand to areas of high demand.

Speaker Biography: Dong Li is an operational research analyst at Avis Budget EMEA Ltd, which he joined in 2010. His main responsibility is to leverage operational research techniques in the car rental industry and in particular the revenue management problems.

He obtained his PhD in Management Science from Lancaster University in 2011, and was awarded the Kingsman Prize 2011 for the high quality of his research and publications. He has also spent three years working at Intel Corporation on problems concerned with the planning and scheduling of semi-conductor production.

Date & Location: 22 February, 12:00-13:00, Boardroom WBS Social Studies building

A new methodology was developed by Dr Arne Strauss that allows to significantly reduce the runtime of LH Systems’ optimisation module without losing revenue performance on average. As the optimisation process is the most time-consuming module and requires large computer clusters for major firms, there are substantial savings in time or required IT. It is generalizable to many other companies that use RM such as railway operations, for example. A publication co-authored with Philipp Kemmer and Thomas Winter (both LH Systems) is forthcoming in the Journal of the Operational Research Society.

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