Designing for cooperation - mechanisms and procedures for air-ground integrated arrival management

An increasing number of tasks within the distributed air traffic management (ATM) system are currently being redesigned towards more cooperative and interactive planning processes involving decision of several agents (automated and human). In order to ensure that agents work together in an optimal manner it has to be achieved that the goals of the individual actors become properly aligned with the global system goal. That way the cooperative system seeks the optimization of the global objective through actors that seek the optimization of their individual self-objectives. Following this approach the paper introduces a game-theoretic perspective to the design of mechanisms for the guidance of arrival traffic at airports. Relevant incentive structures for individual actors are investigated on the basis of results from a distributed air-ground simulation model.