Modelling and solving a car rental revenue optimisation problem (Q2431528)

Summary: We address the problem of a car rental agency that is confronted with how to decide to accept or reject a booking request to optimise the revenue. An innovative integer programming model is devised, which incorporates particularities of the car rental business, like multi-day rents and non-cascading upgrades. To capture the randomness of the demand, robustness measures and the related scenario-based formulations are presented. An extensive computational study is carried out, by considering a set of randomly generated instances. The collected computational results show the relation between problem size and computation time and the effect of risk-aversion on revenue.