Short-term allocation of Time Windows to flights through a distributed market-based mechanism

Air Traffic Flow Management delays are often caused by multiple capacity constrained air traffic resources. In this context, we propose an individual rational and weakly budget balanced market-based negotiation mechanism between flights and the network manager. This mechanism allows flights to pay for reducing their delays or get compensations if they accept an increased delay, with respect to the delay allocated under a First-Planned-First-Served policy. Specifically, we introduce a Lagrangian-based primal distributed heuristic that enables flights to determine the market price of the airspace resources composing their business trajectories. Some computational experience based on a real case instance is reported.