Optimization and mediated bartering models for ground delay programs

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the airline community within the United States have adopted a new paradigm for air traffic flow management, called Collaborative Decision Making (CDM). A principal goal of CDM is shared decision-making responsibility between the FAA and airlines, so as to increase airline control over decisions that involve economic tradeoffs. So far, CDM has primarily led to enhancements in the implementation of Ground Delay Programs, by changing procedures for allocating slots to airlines and exchanging slots between airlines. In this paper, we discuss how these procedures may be formalized through appropriately defined optimization models. In addition, we describe how inter-airline slot exchanges may be viewed as a bartering process, in which each ‘round’ of bartering requires the solution of an optimization problem. We compare the resulting optimization problem with the current procedure for exchanging slots and discuss possibilities for increased decision-making capabilities by the airlines.