Comparison of efficiency of slot allocation by congestion pricing and ration by schedule

When airport arrival slots are scheduled in excess of the available capacity, the scheduled flights are assigned slots by a rationing scheme. The traditional approach is to ration slots by schedule (RBS) on a first-scheduled/first-assigned basis. This approach, although meeting equity criteria, can result in inefficient use of the arrival slots in terms of passenger throughput and fuel burn; however, it does not reflect the business decisions with respect to the value of a given flight to an airline. An alternative approach is to allocate the slots based on an airlines´ willingness-to-pay a congestion fee, set a priori by a regulator, for use of the slot. This paper describes a comparison of the allocation of arrival slots using RBS and Congestion Pricing (CP) for flights scheduled into PHL on 10-Jul-2007. The analysis indicates that rationing by CP yielded improved performance in the reduction of average passenger delays by 39.14%, total Passenger Delays by 37.65% and cancelled flights by 66.66% (9 cancellations in RB to 3 cancelled flights in CP). However, rationing by CP decreased average airline equity metric by 34.81%.