Mechanisms for Inter-Airline Collaborative Rescheduling under Disruptions

Abstract

Disruptions such as inclement weather may result in reduced flight capacities at airports. To maintain demand-capacity balance, airlines and air traffic managers (e.g., the US Federal Aviation Administration) collaboratively reschedule aircraft, resulting in potential delays. Due to a wide range of factors (e.g., flight crews timing out, passenger connections, etc.), a delayed flight may be more or less costly to an airline, even when compared to another similarly delayed flight. Currently, identifying optimal slot swaps between airlines requires sharing the airline-specific delay cost of each flight. However, this is not amenable as sharing these private delay costs could reveal sensitive business practices. We build upon previous work with a ledger-based mechanism that enables inter-airline collaborative rescheduling without revealing private delay costs. Specifically, two extending lines of work will be presented: (1) Introducing more realistic flight delay cost-per-unit-time functions that better model non-linear increases in private delay costs. We utilize a stochastic jump-linear model to derive and incorporate these improved private delay cost models; (2) Analyzing a case study of applying this ledger-based mechanisim for an entire year of historical operations. Previous work only examined the effectiveness of this mechanism across a 1-month period. We will focus this presentation on realistic implementation challenges for airlines and air traffic managers.