Incorporating slot valuation in making airport slot scheduling decisions

Abstract

Airport Slot Allocation (ASA) seeks to manage scarce airport resources by matching airline requests to airport slots. The ASA process is carried out by coordinators, who prioritise airline requests through the consideration of policy rules that aim to serve airlines and the travelling public, improve airport capacity utilisation, connectivity, and competition. Even though the ASA involves both airlines and coordinators, existing studies model the ASA without considering the interactions between airlines’ preferences and the rules and priorities that are considered by the coordinators. This paper introduces an ASA problem variant in which the assignment of airport slots is modelled by considering the interrelation between airlines’ preferences and coordinators’ prioritisation, expressed through time-dependent valuation functions. Through the development of a Mixed Integer Programming Model (MIP) and a preference-based algorithm that integrate the developed valuation functions, we propose request-to-slot assignments that are Pareto optimal per se, ergo guaranteeing that airlines and coordinators have no incentive to reject or alter the proposed schedules. Computational results demonstrate the ability of the proposed MIP and algorithm in supporting coordinators on decisions relating to which requests will be displaced or rejected so as to achieve improved capacity utilisation.