Noraini Noordin

Optimizing Efficiency of Electric Train Service (ETS) Ticket Pricing

Ticket prices for the Electric Train Service (ETS) provided by Keretapi Tanah Melayu (KTMB) have been observed to increase without due consideration to passengers. Some KTMB services are double the costs of other public transport. These fares have also not been priced according to distance travelled. In an attempt to determine the minimum price for the ETS ticket according to type of ticket, this study has investigated the relationship between price and type of passenger, distance travelled and type of seat. Estimation of distances between stations in the data collected from KTMB was done using Google Maps. Other procedures included (i) adapting categorization procedures used by Mijares et al. (2013) for data development, (ii) adapting Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) optimization procedures by Cerrato and Cheung (2006) and (iii) using variance reduction technique (VRT) to calculate pricing efficiency. Random numbers were generated for the MCS based on total ticket price and total distance. Findings indicate that MCS was able to optimize all silver ticket prices, but was only able to minimize gold and platinum ticket price for stations with distances of less than 40 km. More importantly, efficiency scales less than 1 were obtained for all types of tickets (adult and children); thus, pricing efficiency was achieved for this research. Future works in this area may use other optimization procedures to minimize tickets for distances greater than 40 km between stations.

Preliminary time-based NFP model for heavy-tailed Islamic inheritance data

When the dual court system cannot totally and independently function on their own, serious problems affect the administration and distribution of Islamic inheritance causing increasing trends in the number of unclaimed inheritance, high degree of ignorance among Muslims of clear procedures to claim inheritance, and lengthy as well as costly claim processes. Investigation into the processes and procedures at institutions with the authority to distribute Islamic inheritance promotes the construction of a network flow programming model that clearly describes the precedence activities in the claim processes of Islamic inheritance. In particular, preliminary analysis of data characteristics contributes significantly toward defining a new method of estimating activity durations and specifying a time-window for effective range of the estimate.

Islamic inheritance claim processes — Non-normality data traits and best estimator choice

To confront and combat some of the issues in the administration and distribution of Islamic inheritance, Muslims have to look pass constitutional amendments and consider other alternatives as practical solutions to the problem of lengthy and costly claim procedures. Unveiling the uncertainties and confusion undergone by Muslims for so many years has provided the basis for our study to develop the network model and the mathematical model as solution approach to this problem. Careful analysis of variables using normality tests, descriptive statistics, normal and detrended plots as well as box-plots confirms the non-normality of variables, a finding upon which is built the assumption to use median absolute deviation as the best measure of variation to estimate activity durations of the model.