An heuristic market-based procedure for the collaborative assignment of ATFM resources

The allocation of ground delays to flights is a tactical tool commonly employed to control the flow of air traffic and to ensure that the available capacity of system resources is respected. Under the current European system these delays are assigned by the Network Manager according to a First-Planned-First-Served principle, without taking into account the individual cost of delay suffered by different flights. In this paper we formalize a decentralized, Individual Rational and Budget Balanced market-based mechanism for the collaborative assignment of delays among flights, based on the Lagrangian relaxation of the central assignment problem. It allows flights to pay for reducing their delays or to be compensated if they accept an increased delay with respect to the First-Planned-First-Served rule. We analyze its applicability under the general case of multiple capacity constrained resources and considering cost of delay functions for flights which are non-linear over time. The results obtained from a computational experience on a real traffic sample indicate that significant benefits could be achieved if it were implemented.