Incentives in Arrival Management: Agents' Interests vs. Designers' Expectations

Abstract

The contribution deals with the validation of planning mechanisms for arrival management in air traffic control, focusing on the compatibility of participating agents’ interests with designers’s expectations. Future arrival management is expected to feature increasing interaction and data exchange between the aircraft and ground systems. Part of the planning made by systems on the ground, will be based explicitely on user (i.e. aircraft) inputs and preferences. If the new interaction protocols and planning mechanisms are not designed properly, the self-interested behavior of individual aircraft can run counter to the realization of a high global system efficiency. In this work, a model-based approach using a Coloured Petri Net (CPN) Model [1] is used to analyze the incentivecompatibilityof two alternative sequence planning mechanism for merging aircraft during approach. It is shown that for one system variant individual agents’ interests contradict some of the system designers’ behavioral expectations, while for a second variant incentives and expectations are better aligned.