An Auction-Based Mechanism for a Privacy-Preserving Marketplace for ATFM Slots

In case of reduced capacity of the European air traffic network, the Network Manager (NM) initiates a regulation, causing flight delay. The flights are issued air traffic flow management (ATFM) slots according to the principle “first-planned, first-served”. For airspace users, however, different flights have different priorities due to the individual cost structures of different flights. In this regard, the SlotMachine system will allow airspace users to submit preferences regarding the arrival or departure times of flights, which are then considered during a privacy-preserving optimization run that aims to find an optimal flight list while keeping the preferences a secret, even to the operator of the SlotMachine. In order to provide airspace users with an incentive to participate in an optimization run and submit truthful preferences, an appropritate market mechanism is required, which handles compensation for airspace users giving up favorable ATFM slots. In this paper, we present an auction-based market mechanism for the SlotMachine system with credits instead of real-world currency.

Keywords: Air Traffic Flow Management, Mechanism Design, Genetic Algorithm, Multi-Party Computation