Consensus-Building Mechanism for Setting Service Expectations in Air Traffic Flow Management

A significant challenge of effective air traffic flow management (ATFM) is to allow various competing airlines to collaborate with an air navigation service provider (ANSP) in determining flow management initiatives. Over the past 15 years this challenge has led to the development of a broad approach to ATFM known as collaborative decision making (CDM). A set of CDM principles has evolved to guide the development of specific tools that support ATFM resource allocation. However, these principles have not been extended to cover the problem of providing strategic advice to an ANSP in the initial planning stages of traffic management initiatives. This paper describes a mechanism in which competing airlines provide consensus advice to an ANSP by means of a voting mechanism. The mechanism is based on the recently developed majority judgment voting procedure. The result of the procedure is a consensus real-valued vector that must satisfy a set of constraints imposed by the weather and traffic conditions of the day in question. Although this problem was developed and modeled on the basis of specific ATFM features, it appears to be highly generic and amenable to a much broader set of applications. Analysis of this problem involved several interesting sub-problems, including a type of column generation process that created candidate vectors for input to the voting process.