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Coordinated by:
1
Nommon
Consortium members:
ALG UVA‐INSISOC UNITS
Research Questions
How can strategic airport slot allocation be addressed? What are the potential benefits and the risks of introducing market‐based mechanisms for airport slot allocation? How can we model the dynamics of different slot market designs?
Research Scope
The ACCESS project addresses demand and capacity management at congested airports, focusing on market‐based mechanisms for the strategic allocation of airport capacity. Market mechanisms are expected to provide the right incentives for a more efficient use of the available capacity, but they also raise a number of concerns, from the potentially negative impact on airline operating costs to cases of market failures. There is therefore a need for a comprehensive assessment of different market designs for slot allocation. ACCESS will tackle this problem from the perspective of complex adaptive systems: due to the complexity of the combinatorial assignment problems underlying primary slot auctioning and secondary slot trading, agent‐based computational economics provides a particularly suitable framework to study of different alternatives for market design, allowing the modelling and exploration of features — such as bounded rationality, evolutionary behaviour or asymmetry of information — that are not properly captured by classical approaches from economics and operations research.
Research Results
Analysis of the current airport slot allocation process. Review of different auction types and market designs, looking at the way these mechanisms have worked in other sectors and how they could be applied to airport slot allocation. Set of performance areas and performance indicators for the comprehensive assessment of different airport slot allocation mechanisms. This performance framework, as well as the proposed market designs, will be refined and validated through an extensive consultation with stakeholders. Simulated test environment for the assessment of the proposed market mechanisms along the specified performance areas. The tool will encompass an agent‐based model of the airport slot market and a data analysis and visualisation module to facilitate the interpretation of the simulation results. Assessment of the expected impact of different market designs in a variety of scenarios. A stylised, more parsimonious pilot model will be used to undertake a theoretical study of the full range of proposed solutions, leading to the selection of a reduced number of market designs, which will then be evaluated in a more detailed model of the ECAC area.