Stable two-sided matching of slot allocation in airport collaborative decision making by top trading cycles mechanism

The problem of capacity shortage in some airports needs to be dealt with sustainable solutions including a more efficient use of the existing runway slots at the airports. The Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) is an important approach applied to Air Traffic Management (ATM) to achieve this efficient use of the slots allocation. Using the Matching approach for two-sided markets of Game theory, the Top Trading Cycle CDM (TTC-CDM) algorithm developed in this research is an extension of the CDM approach aggregating the Ground Delay Program (GDP) of the air sector. The paper compared the developed TTC-CDM model to the existing models such as the conventional Compression algorithm in CDM, the Trade Cycle algorithm and the Deferred Acceptance CDM (DA-CDM) model to evaluate the performance of the proposed model. Through a case study, the results show the effective application of TTC-CDM model to slot allocation in ATM and also presents the advantage of considering the preferences of airport managers beside ATC controllers and airlines in the decision processing.