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An Incentive Compatible, Efficient Market for Air Traffic Flow Management

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Book cover Computing and Combinatorics (COCOON 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10392))

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Abstract

We present a market-based approach to the Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) problem. The goods in our market are delays and buyers are airline companies; the latter pay money to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to buy away the desired amount of delay on a per flight basis. We give a notion of equilibrium for this market and an LP whose every optimal solution gives an equilibrium allocation of flights to landing slots as well as equilibrium prices for the landing slots. Via a reduction to matching, we show that this equilibrium can be computed combinatorially in strongly polynomial time. Moreover, there is a special set of equilibrium prices, which can be computed easily, that is identical to the VCG solution, and therefore the market is incentive compatible in dominant strategy.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to [7], the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee estimated that in 2007, the loss to the U.S. economy was $25.7 billion, due to 2.75 million hours of flight delays. In contrast, the total profit of U.S. airlines in that year was $5 billion. Also, see [4] for another perspective.

  2. 2.

    e.g., they know best if a certain flight needs to be served first because it is carrying CEOs of important companies who have paid a premium in order to reach their destination on time or if delaying a certain flight by 30 min will not have dire consequences, however delaying it longer would propagate delays through their entire system and result in a huge loss.

  3. 3.

    We will assume that if the flight arrives before this time, it will have to wait on the tarmac for some time. This appears to be a standard practice for the majority of times, in case gates are not available.

  4. 4.

    All the results of this paper hold even if \(c_{is} \ne 0\).

  5. 5.

    The instance we construct can also be reduced to a minimum weight perfect matching problem with quadratic increase in number of nodes.

  6. 6.

    This is not going to affect strong polynomiality, because we can assume that \(cap(s)\le |A|, \forall s\) without loss of generality.

  7. 7.

    Equilibrium prices p are minimum if for any other equilibrium prices \(p'\) we have \(p_s \le p'_s, \ \forall s \in S\).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, USA

    Ruta Mehta

  2. College of Computing, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, Georgia

    Vijay V. Vazirani

Authors
  1. Ruta Mehta
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  2. Vijay V. Vazirani
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Correspondence to Ruta Mehta .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

    Yixin Cao

  2. Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA

    Jianer Chen

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Mehta, R., Vazirani, V.V. (2017). An Incentive Compatible, Efficient Market for Air Traffic Flow Management. In: Cao, Y., Chen, J. (eds) Computing and Combinatorics. COCOON 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10392. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62389-4_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62389-4_34

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62389-4

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