An Incentive Compatible, Efficient Market for Air Traffic Flow Management

• Published in: Computing and Combinatorics Vol. 10392; pp. 407 - 419
• Main Authors: Mehta, Ruta, Vazirani, Vijay V.
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2017; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• ISBN: 3319623885; 9783319623887
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-62389-4_34

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.