Price-Setting Auctions for Airport Slot Allocation: a Multi-Airport Case Study

ACCESS (www.access-sesar.eu) is a SESAR WPE research project that addresses the study of market-based mechanisms for airport slot allocation from the perspective of agent-based computational economics. In this paper, we present the airport slot allocation simulation model developed by ACCESS and we apply it to the evaluation of primary slot auctioning in a multi-airport scenario. We show how combinatorial price-setting auctions can be used to balance capacity and demand in a decentralized manner, without the need for airlines to disclose sensitive information, so that the available capacity is used by those airlines able to make best economic use of it. The end prices of the auction reveal the economic value of each slot.