Noncooperative Coordination for Decentralized Air Traffic Management

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel noncooperative framework for decentralized air traffic management, focusing on incentive design and equilibrium engineering to enable scalable, robust coordination among self-interested stakeholders.

Contribution

It introduces a unified noncooperative approach with scalable equilibrium methods, decentralized mechanism design, and convergence guarantees for safety-critical air traffic systems.

Findings

Developed reduced-rank correlated equilibria for scalability

Designed incentive-compatible decentralized mechanisms

Proved convergence of structured noncooperative dynamics

Abstract

Decentralized air traffic management requires coordination among self-interested stakeholders operating under shared safety and capacity constraints, where conventional centralized or implicitly cooperative models do not adequately capture this setting. We develop a unified perspective on noncooperative coordination, in which system-level outcomes emerge by designing incentives and assigning signals that reshape individual optimality rather than imposing cooperation or enforcement. We advance this framework along three directions: scalable equilibrium engineering via reduced-rank and uncertainty-aware correlated equilibria, decentralized mechanism design for equilibrium selection without enforcement, and structured noncooperative dynamics with convergence guarantees. Beyond these technical contributions, we discuss core design principles that govern incentive-compatible coordination in decentralized systems. Together, these results establish a foundation for scalable, robust coordination in safety-critical air traffic systems.