Paper 134 -- Equitable Allocation of Enroute Airspace Resources

Ration-by-schedule (RBS) has provided a widely accepted resource-rationing principle for ground delay program (GDP) planning in the U.S. Rationing of airspace resources poses significant new challenges not well-addressed by RBS. In this paper, we describe new resource rationing principles and a new methodology for use in rationing access to constrained enroute airspace. While RBS implicity assumes that all flights requesting a slot must receive one, our new methods explicitly allow some flights to be refused access, since flight operators have the option of rerouting around the constrained airspace. Unlike RBS our methodology requires and makes use of flight operator preference information and it employs randomization. Our methods have potential usefulness both in airspace flow program (AFP) planning and in the emerging System Enhancements for Versatile Electronic Negotiation (SEVEN).