KSS Fuels to present session on fuels price optimization at OR52 Conference

KSS Fuels researchers Barbara Jenkins, Tom Liptrot, Davie McCaffrey will deliver a paper entitled “Optimization of Prices Across a Retail Fuel Network” at the conference, to be held at Royal Holloway University of London, in Egham, England, Sept 7-9, 2010. OR52 is presented by the Operational Research (OR) Society, the world's oldest-established professional society catering to the OR profession, and one of the largest in the world, with 3,000 members in 53 countries. The conference typically attracts more than 300 delegates from the UK, Europe, North America and elsewhere. The conference program contains a mixture of plenary sessions given by keynote speakers and parallel streams, covering all aspects of OR.

“It is an honor for KSS Fuels to be included as a presenter at this prestigious conference, which brings together some of the top operational research minds in the world,” said Bob Stein, president and CEO of KSS Fuels. “KSS Fuels is a leading developer of business intelligence and price optimization tools because we are committed to having the most scientifically advanced pricing software available in the market.”

The presentation at OR52 from KSS Fuels addresses an application of price optimization and demand forecasting applied to the retail sale of automotive fuels. As an outline, the paper will introduce:

• the context of the pricing problem, with a review of the modeling approach;
• results and analysis of commercial price optimization software applied to site-level optimization at a US fuel retail network, detailing how it increases gross profit while maintaining site level volume targets;
• a new methodology for implementing optimization across a network of fuel retail sites, indicating how this sits as a supervisory system above the site level price optimization system;
• some results from application of this methodology at a US fuel retail network

The paper also discusses how the network optimization methodology provides decision support for annual setting and management of volume targets at the network level.