Visualizing revenue management trade-offs via a two-dimensional pareto curve showing measures of overall volume or share versus measures of overall profitability or adjusted revenue

A method for providing revenue management that considers sales volume and profitability, said method comprising:

• providing an optimization model for a portfolio of products and/or services that can be used to find prices, sales and production levels of the products that maximize an aggregate contribution margin for the products and/or services that are embodied in an objection function for the optimization model;
• solving the optimization model that contains a set of business constraints for different sales of the products and/or services where each solution to the optimization model corresponds to a particular aggregate sales level and a particular aggregate contribution margin;
• plotting the solutions of the optimization model on a graph that shows aggregate sales and aggregate contribution margin;
• repeating the steps of solving the optimization model and plotting the solutions of the model on the graph using different sets of constraints;
• and
• analyzing the graph to determine price and production levels of the products and/or services that maintain sales volumes while maximizing aggregate contribution margin, maintain aggregate contribution margin while maximizing sales volume, maximizes aggregate contribution and maximizes sales volume regardless of impact on aggregate contribution margin;

A method for providing revenue management that considers sales volume and profitability, said method comprising:

• providing an optimization model with an objective function for describing an aggregate contribution margin for a plurality of products;
• solving the optimization model using a set of business constraints for increasing sales of the products, where each solution of the optimization model corresponds to a particular aggregate sales level and a particular aggregate contribution margin;
• plotting the solutions to the optimization model on a graph that shows aggregate sales and aggregate contribution margin;
• repeating the steps of solving the optimization model and plotting the solutions of the functions on the graph using different sets of constraints;
• defining an arbitrary base case condition on the graph;
• and
• analyzing the graph by comparing the graph lines to each other and the base case condition to determine price and production levels of the products that maintain sales volumes while maximizing aggregate contribution margin, maintain aggregate contribution margin while maximizing sales volume, maximizes aggregate contribution margin and maximizes sales volume regardless of impact on aggregate contribution margin.