Satisficing Game Approach to Collaborative Decision Making Including Airport Management

Collaborative decision making (CDM) has been used as an essential paradigm to increase the efficiency of air traffic flow management (ATFM), including takeoff or landing operations at airports. Air traffic control (ATC) services and airlines have been involved in the current CDM, but airport management service, an important stakeholder, has not been involved yet, generally. This paper proposes a new CDM model, which is named satisficing CDM, that is based on the satisficing game theory. This model includes three main entities (ATC, airlines, and airport management) in ATFM. The complete set of functions (preference, rejectability, and selectability) is established for each of the entities. Because the delay due to ground or air holding potentially alters the takeoff or the landing order of a flight, the sequence of takeoff and landing is determined through the satisficing negotiation process. To demonstrate the utility of the developed intelligent system, experiments are run with real air traffic in the terminal area of Sao Paulo. The experimental results show the importance and effectiveness of including airport management services in CDM. The sequences of takeoff and landing determined by the proposed model mostly meet the preferences of the three stakeholders in the given real traffic scenarios.