Social distancing and revenue management—A post-pandemic adaptation for railways

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has had a significant impact on rail operations worldwide. Adopting control measures such as a 50% occupancy rate can contribute to a safer travel environment, though at the expense of operational efficiency. This paper addresses the issues of social distancing and revenue maximization for a train operating company in a post-pandemic world. Although the two objectives appear to be highly contradictory, we believe that judicious planning can optimize both to a great extent. Existing research on social distancing on public transport has only considered the risk of virus transmission during travel. This is the first attempt to recognize the risk of virus spread in different cities along with transmission risk as part of developing a social distancing plan. We study the problem of assigning seats to passenger groups on long-distance trains while ensuring social distancing within coaches. A novel seating assignment policy is proposed that takes into account several factors that govern the spread of virus. In an effort to reduce the spread of the virus and improve revenue simultaneously, a mixed-integer programming (MIP) model is proposed to assign seats to passengers. Several families of valid inequalities and preprocessing steps are proposed to strengthen the MIP formulation, which represents a substantial contribution to the literature on group seat assignment problem. The validity of the model and the effectiveness of the valid inequalities have been evaluated using real-life data from Indian Railways. The computational results demonstrate a significant reduction in the risk of contagion and an increase in seat utilization compared to the current approach employed by operators.