I seek help on a problem that I stumbled upon when thinking about a rational teleporter’s story.
As typical of such protagonists, he finds that he can teleport and teleport a human’s mass sideways with him, seemingly unharmed. As befits a rational protagonist, he experiments and finds out that he can teleport animals and after a demonstration to a very reluctant brother, he realises that he can teleport a human being, unharmed. After a crazy week of teleporting, he realises that he needs approximately 3 minutes to recuperate after a teleport to really do the next time well. He also realises that he can’t move more than 2 people.
He is a nice person in general and instead of turning bad, wants to start a teleportation business. He has decided on an approximately 8 hour work day for himself.
I immediately thought that his niche would be in very high-end people transportation. To be really conservative, he just wants to teleport people from one international port to another to another, so that they continue to pass via the same security procedures as befits international flight. He announces that he will do domestic teleportation (to non-international port destinations) only after an international teleportation and an immediate immigration passage is given to him and his client. These are listed so that nations don’t lock him up as a threat.
So, how to maximise revenue from teleportation? The simplest answer can be that he auctions 7 minute time slots on a website, where the clients can enter their Source and Destination. But the issue with that is that all “reset/return” teleports (From destination of Slot N to Source of Slot N+1) are going empty. Then, i thought that there might be a secondary auction where he auctions off these empty slots. But these secondary auctions also need time and the more time you give for the secondary auction, the less attractive the primary auctions become. He is competing against business jets which are available at a very quick notice.
Any ideas on how to resolve the issue of maximising revenue? Is this a straightforward Operations Research problem that I can look up?
What mathematical process/jargon am I missing here?
One option is to have clients enter their source, destination, bid, and the range of times when they’d be willing to travel, and to have an algorithm for selecting the highest revenue path (which won’t always mean accepting the highest bid, if slightly lower bids can chain together destinations and sources). (There could also be a secondary market to fill any otherwise-empty legs in this path.) The operations problem of creating this algorithm seems related to the traveling salesman problem (it’s a different problem, but may involve similar math).
But I expect that, to maximize revenue, satisfying the highest-paying clients will be more important than efficiency in maximizing the number of paying clients per hour. Prices of trips are likely to vary by more than an order of magnitude, and trips with a fixed source, destination, and time would tend to get lower bids. He might even want to give some of these otherwise-empty trips away for free, (e.g., as “upgrades” to airline passengers who were scheduled on that route, in order to build goodwill with airlines who are now sharing the airport with him, and who may be able to do him favors like transporting passengers who he has to cancel on).
There are complications in terms of the timing of booking (regardless of whether there are secondary auctions), because some high-paying clients will want to book at the last minute and get a trip ASAP, while others will want to book in advance and have a guarantee that the trip will go as scheduled. So the revenue-maximizing strategy would probably involve a mix of trips booked in advance and trips booked closer to the departure time, with some preference for clients who are more flexible about timing or cancellations.
I seek help on a problem that I stumbled upon when thinking about a rational teleporter’s story.
As typical of such protagonists, he finds that he can teleport and teleport a human’s mass sideways with him, seemingly unharmed. As befits a rational protagonist, he experiments and finds out that he can teleport animals and after a demonstration to a very reluctant brother, he realises that he can teleport a human being, unharmed. After a crazy week of teleporting, he realises that he needs approximately 3 minutes to recuperate after a teleport to really do the next time well. He also realises that he can’t move more than 2 people.
He is a nice person in general and instead of turning bad, wants to start a teleportation business. He has decided on an approximately 8 hour work day for himself.
I immediately thought that his niche would be in very high-end people transportation. To be really conservative, he just wants to teleport people from one international port to another to another, so that they continue to pass via the same security procedures as befits international flight. He announces that he will do domestic teleportation (to non-international port destinations) only after an international teleportation and an immediate immigration passage is given to him and his client. These are listed so that nations don’t lock him up as a threat.
So, how to maximise revenue from teleportation? The simplest answer can be that he auctions 7 minute time slots on a website, where the clients can enter their Source and Destination. But the issue with that is that all “reset/return” teleports (From destination of Slot N to Source of Slot N+1) are going empty. Then, i thought that there might be a secondary auction where he auctions off these empty slots. But these secondary auctions also need time and the more time you give for the secondary auction, the less attractive the primary auctions become. He is competing against business jets which are available at a very quick notice.
Any ideas on how to resolve the issue of maximising revenue? Is this a straightforward Operations Research problem that I can look up? What mathematical process/jargon am I missing here?
One option is to have clients enter their source, destination, bid, and the range of times when they’d be willing to travel, and to have an algorithm for selecting the highest revenue path (which won’t always mean accepting the highest bid, if slightly lower bids can chain together destinations and sources). (There could also be a secondary market to fill any otherwise-empty legs in this path.) The operations problem of creating this algorithm seems related to the traveling salesman problem (it’s a different problem, but may involve similar math).
But I expect that, to maximize revenue, satisfying the highest-paying clients will be more important than efficiency in maximizing the number of paying clients per hour. Prices of trips are likely to vary by more than an order of magnitude, and trips with a fixed source, destination, and time would tend to get lower bids. He might even want to give some of these otherwise-empty trips away for free, (e.g., as “upgrades” to airline passengers who were scheduled on that route, in order to build goodwill with airlines who are now sharing the airport with him, and who may be able to do him favors like transporting passengers who he has to cancel on).
There are complications in terms of the timing of booking (regardless of whether there are secondary auctions), because some high-paying clients will want to book at the last minute and get a trip ASAP, while others will want to book in advance and have a guarantee that the trip will go as scheduled. So the revenue-maximizing strategy would probably involve a mix of trips booked in advance and trips booked closer to the departure time, with some preference for clients who are more flexible about timing or cancellations.
I think the correct solution probably involves hiring secretaries to manage the whole affair instead of bidding on a website.