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Coastal short-term cruise products are matched with Chinese consumer demand characteristics. Launching coastal short-term cruise products can help local Chinese cruise companies change the monopoly status of foreign cruise companies in China. This paper builds a two-stage optimization model to provide a decision-making method for local Chinese cruise companies. The first stage determines the itinerary scheme, with the goals of minimizing the cost and maximizing the potential demand. The second stage determines the cabin price, with the goal of maximizing the profit of the cruise company. The model considers the competition of cruise products and their alternative products based on consumer preferences. In the case study, we take Dalian Port as the home port to do the numerical analysis. The results show that coastal cruise products with journey times of 2–3 days have the highest market penetration and are more profitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A bi-level programming method for authorities to design car ban schemes is proposed. The problem is formulated as a nonlinear integer bi-level programming problem with the objective of minimizing the total travel time of cars on weekdays. The proposed ban scheme is obtained based on the spatial distribution of the last digits on car license plates and considers the fairness of car users by balancing the daily traffic service levels. A case study is investigated with real data from Dalian city. A comparison of the schemes based on both the proposed method and the traditional method indicates that the scheme of the proposed method can decrease the total car travel time during morning peak hours on weekdays by 134,900 h, which is equivalent to 4.5 min per car per day. • A method is put forth to propose travel ban scheme of cars. • The spatial distribution of the last digit on cars' number plates is considered. • The equilibrium of daily traffic flows and the fairness of car users are considered. • Data from a city (Dalian) are used to test the method. • The average travel time during each morning rush hour will decrease by 4.5 min/vehicle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]