A Game Theory Model For Optimizing Flight Time Slot Allocation

The rapid development of the civil aviation industry causes a tremendous challenge to the airport, heavy traffic jams and sustained flight delays often appear in the peak of the flight flow or in adverse weather conditions. The traffic control at airport is one of the key factors that affect flight delays, but the wasting and the crowding phenomenon actually exists at present in the special period. Therefore, how to make efficient use of the airport flight slots is the key to modify the traffic control. Then the process of the slots allocation is changed to use the free slots properly and efficiently, which can also reduce the total flight delays.This paper mainly researched flight slot allocation in order to modify the condition of pushback. The process of pushback and slot allocation was introduced firstly based on Virtual Queue and the related factors. According to the ideas from the Stackelberg game, the allocation model, whose players were ATC and airlines, was constructed. The model treated the total payoffs as the objective function, and defined the actual airport capacity, slots utilization rate, delays cost, passengers' losses and some other related variables as the constraints. Then the Stackelberg equilibrium was obtained to solve the model. Meanwhile, in order to limit the blind application of airlines and the other irrational behavior, this paper also presents a credit-priority strategy to ensure the fairness of the competition between airlines.Finally, according to the actual departures data from a western airport, the model and the hybrid optimization strategy was verified based on MATLAB simulation.Simulation results showed the income with the Stackelberg game model and the optimized hybrid strategy is higher than the original data. And what's more, it can be adjusted to a real-time slot allocation scheme in a period of time, which can complete the optimization of flights and get the most proper virtual queue. This will not only improve the utilization of airport slots and reduce fuel consumption, but also relieve airport congestion, reduce flight delays and achieve all-win cooperation among ATC, airports, airlines, passengers and the other players.