The project built on the concept of User-Driven Prioritisation Process (UDPP) developed by EUROCONTROL. UDPP is a simple way for airlines to avoid impact of massive delays on their fleet, by reordering their own flights when an Air Traffic Flow Management regulation hits them. Each delayed flight has a cost for the airline, but this cost is highly contextual, depending on the type of flight, number of passengers, even time of the day. Airlines are nowadays able to protect their most important flights (i.e. the most costly) by swapping their slots with slots assigned to less important flights.
BEACON studied the feasibility of extending UDPP to allow more efficient prioritisation processes, in particular allowing slots to be exchanged between airlines. For example, low-volume airlines (with a small number of flights) cannot exchange slots among themselves, but may hold slots that are of real value to other companies. Exchanging these slots against a potential compensation should thus allow for a more efficient system from the total cost point of view.
Different types of mechanisms and credit systems were tested in BEACON. On top of their overall efficiency, a special attention was paid to issues of fairness and equity, i.e. how different airlines are impacted. The mechanisms were tested using two models that can capture network effects in the airline cost structure, an important issue when it comes to their cost-minimisation decisions.
To properly capture the actors' behaviours, BEACON made use of behavioural economics. Non-rational behaviours like loss-aversion and hyperbolic discounting were embedded in the models in order to take them into account in the design of the new prioritisation mechanisms right from the start. Indeed, decisions featuring deviations from rationality may change the way the mechanisms behave with respect to a perfect rational baseline. Behavioural experiments were carried out in order to calibrate these effects, in particular using human-in-the-loop simulations.
BEACON showed that behavioural and gaming aspects may have a very important role in this context, severely decreasing the economic efficiency of inter-airlines mechanisms. The project proved that approximations and possible errors in the calculation of flight cost functions are crucial, and their effects are underestimated in the current research. Moreover, the project showed that designing an efficient inter-airline mechanism that can do better than an intra-airline one is difficult, due to the combined effects of gaming and behavioural effects, issues of approximations and errors, and relatively high level of cost efficiency of intra-airlines optimisations, less prone to these various issues. Finally, the project showed that equity issues are far from trivial, and that a consensus is needed on what the actual goal of UDPP mechanisms is in terms of economic efficiency and/or equity. BEACON increased the understanding on what Behavioural Economics can add to ATM concepts elaboration and validation methodologies and deepened and broadened the concepts of prioritisation in ATM beyond UDPP and their potential impacts on Network performance. It formed a guideline and numerous recommendations for future research in this field, both from a theoretical and a practical point of view.
