A market approach to real-time departure runway scheduling

Departure runway usage is a major source of delay in the US National Airspace System. Additionally, the current first-come-first-served paradigm for allocating departure runway usage produces strong incentives to airlines to spend all this delay time on the taxiway, even though this can result in wasted fuel. In this paper, a novel dynamic second-price auction method for allocating runway usage is developed. Analytical and simulated results are obtained that suggest the proposed method does not increase total delay, and that almost all delay is spent at the gate (thereby saving fuel). Thousands of simulations of a realistic scenario at John F. Kennedy International Airport indicate that this new mechanism offers two benefits over the current first-come-first-served mechanism. The first benefit suggests this mechanism can reduce airline costs (beyond the savings on fuel). The second benefit suggests the auction mechanism can generate more equitable spread of delay across airlines by an appropriate parametrization over budget constraints.