Dynamic Decision Making with Applications in Healthcare and Airline Revenue Management

The goal of my Ph.D. thesis is to develop data-driven sequential decision-making algorithms that are applicable in airline revenue management and healthcare. Since the liberalisation of the airline market in the 1970s, airline companies have aimed to design better revenue management systems. An airline revenue management system computes the optimal fare to charge for a given customer. Traditional pricing methodologies used stochastic revenue management systems to optimise their revenue. They assume a parametric forecasting model for the demand without accounting for competition, and capacity constraints. With the help of data from an aviation partner, we have access to bookings, searches, and competition pricing data.

We wish to use the available data to derive an effective initial policy to price tickets. Further, the existing data is used to create a simulator to improve the performance of the derived initial policy. We plan to benchmark the proposed algorithms against state-of-the-art methodologies from approaches that are currently employed in practice. Subsequently, we wish to run a pilot program to validate the performance of these methods in a real-world setting.
The proposed algorithms utilise the searches and competition data which would be a novel addition to the revenue management literature. Online deployment of the algorithms to drive profit would also be a novel addition to the literature. The project would fall under the operations research theme under EPSRC's strategies. We collaborate with SKY Airlines to collect data and deploy the algorithms in an online fashion.

For the development of AI tools in healthcare, doctors must trust the treatment prescribed by an algorithm. Traditional methods either use a black box method for prediction, assume a parametric model for transitions, or don't account for ambiguity. Here we aim to develop interpretable dynamic treatment regimes to sequentially decide the medicine to prescribe to a patient when there is...