Air traffic flow management (ATFM) slots are allocated times of departure, arrival, or passage through a sector, which are issued by Eurocontrol’s Network Manager to regulate traffic in congested areas of airspace. Typically, simple swaps between flights take place. Such exchanges are helpful for airlines to prioritise expensive flights in order to minimise costs and passenger delays, providing much needed flexibility.
Slot swapping is currently restricted to two flights. Flight cost structures, which tend to drive prioritisation, vary for any number of reasons from the provisioning of connecting flights for passengers to work-time restrictions for crew members, are confidential information for the airlines. This is where the SlotMachine project plays a role in optimising the allocation of flights according to airline priorities based on the cost structure of the different airlines. By using blockchain technology and secure multi-party computation, the project allows flexible prioritisation without the need to disclose confidential information. The research builds on the existing user-driven prioritization process (UDPP)2 solution, which allows airspace users to reschedule their flights to keep their business-driven priorities on track.
SlotMachine successfully deployed multi-party computation (MPC) and hyper-ledger techniques to determine the optimal flight sequence based on airline costs without disclosing sensitive information to competitors and without the need of a trusted arbiter. The project employed evolutionary optimisation algorithms, e.g., genetic algorithm, that seeks solutions to the flight list prioritization problem in an iterative manner. The advantage of such algorithms is that they can be parallelized easily and aborted at any point while still returning a solution.
SlotMachine showed the feasibility of a privacy-preserving platform, recognising an essential element in the future aviation industry. The next step is to update the technology stack and involve more airlines and air navigation system providers in real swaps between multiple airlines.
Benefits
- Trustworthy ATFM slot marketplace
- Improved airline efficiency
- Lower emissions and shorter delays
