Optimization of cross-administrative waterborne tourism transportation network and profit allocation under an alliance framework

Water area resources typically span multiple administrative regions. To avoid administrative barrier hampering economies of scale in water tourism transportation and offer better tourism transportation services, a business model for operating the resources of water tourism and water transportation in entire water area based on alliances is proposed. According to waterside accessibility of tourism resources, a cross-administrative water transportation network is established, and a bi-level model is built to determine the optimal ship ticket price and passenger flows on shipping routes with objective to maximize alliance's profit. Based on resource endowments of each region and its shipping companies, a ship assignment model for tourism shipping routes is developed to determine routes' capacities and the capacities being placed by each member. By inverse optimization, a revenue distribution model considering tourism resources is established to find a suitable resource compensation price to ensure Pareto equilibrium, so as to stabilize the alliance. The results of the case study show that the revenue of tourism shipping companies under the alliance increases by 26.88% compared with that of independent operation, and the mode share of waterway transportation of scenic tourism increases to 87.3%.