A Market for Air Traffic Flow Management

TL;DR

This paper proposes a market-based approach to air traffic flow management that allows airlines to buy delay reductions, balancing efficiency and fairness through a simple, computable model.

Contribution

It introduces a novel market mechanism for ATFM that enables airlines to trade delays, providing an efficient and fair scheduling solution with a polynomial-time algorithm.

Findings

Market model allows airlines to buy delay reductions at going rates.

The solution is simple, requiring only one parameter per flight.

A strongly polynomial algorithm computes equilibrium schedules and prices.

Abstract

The two somewhat conflicting requirements of efficiency and fairness make ATFM an unsatisfactorily solved problem, despite its overwhelming importance. In this paper, we present an economics motivated solution that is based on the notion of a free market. Our contention is that in fact the airlines themselves are the best judge of how to achieve efficiency and our market-based solution gives them the ability to pay, at the going rate, to buy away the desired amount of delay on a per flight basis. The issue of fairness is simply finessed away by our solution -- whoever pays gets smaller delays. We show how our solution has the potential of enabling travelers from a large spectrum of affordability and punctuality requirements to achieve an end that is most desirable to them. Our market model is particularly simple, requiring only one parameter per flight from the airline company. Furthermore, we show that it admits a combinatorial, strongly polynomial algorithm for computing an equilibrium landing schedule and prices.