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Incentive-Compatible Vertiport Reservation in Advanced Air Mobility: An Auction-Based Approach

Pan-Yang Su, Chinmay Maheshwari, Victoria Tuck, Shankar Sastry

TL;DR

This paper tackles efficient, fair, and safe coordination of heterogeneous eVTOL operations across vertiports in advanced air mobility by designing an incentive-compatible auction-based reservation mechanism. It couples a generalized VCG-style allocation with a congestion-aware social welfare objective and computes allocations via a time-expanded auxiliary graph that leads to a mixed binary linear program. Theoretical guarantees establish incentive compatibility, individual rationality, and social-welfare maximization, while the MBLP formulation ensures computational tractability for exchange-based resource allocation. The approach is versatile, extensible to additional congestion modes and trajectories, and has implications for broader multi-robot coordination beyond air traffic management.

Abstract

The rise of advanced air mobility (AAM) is expected to become a multibillion-dollar industry in the near future. Market-based mechanisms are touted to be an integral part of AAM operations, which comprise heterogeneous operators with private valuations. In this work, we study the problem of designing a mechanism to coordinate the movement of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, operated by multiple operators each having heterogeneous valuations associated with their fleet, between vertiports, while enforcing the arrival, departure, and parking constraints at vertiports. Particularly, we propose an incentive-compatible and individually rational vertiport reservation mechanism that maximizes a social welfare metric, which encapsulates the objective of maximizing the overall valuations of all operators while minimizing the congestion at vertiports. Additionally, we improve the computational tractability of designing the reservation mechanism by proposing a mixed binary linear programming approach that leverages the network flow structure.

Incentive-Compatible Vertiport Reservation in Advanced Air Mobility: An Auction-Based Approach

TL;DR

This paper tackles efficient, fair, and safe coordination of heterogeneous eVTOL operations across vertiports in advanced air mobility by designing an incentive-compatible auction-based reservation mechanism. It couples a generalized VCG-style allocation with a congestion-aware social welfare objective and computes allocations via a time-expanded auxiliary graph that leads to a mixed binary linear program. Theoretical guarantees establish incentive compatibility, individual rationality, and social-welfare maximization, while the MBLP formulation ensures computational tractability for exchange-based resource allocation. The approach is versatile, extensible to additional congestion modes and trajectories, and has implications for broader multi-robot coordination beyond air traffic management.

Abstract

The rise of advanced air mobility (AAM) is expected to become a multibillion-dollar industry in the near future. Market-based mechanisms are touted to be an integral part of AAM operations, which comprise heterogeneous operators with private valuations. In this work, we study the problem of designing a mechanism to coordinate the movement of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, operated by multiple operators each having heterogeneous valuations associated with their fleet, between vertiports, while enforcing the arrival, departure, and parking constraints at vertiports. Particularly, we propose an incentive-compatible and individually rational vertiport reservation mechanism that maximizes a social welfare metric, which encapsulates the objective of maximizing the overall valuations of all operators while minimizing the congestion at vertiports. Additionally, we improve the computational tractability of designing the reservation mechanism by proposing a mixed binary linear programming approach that leverages the network flow structure.
Paper Structure (19 sections, 4 theorems, 25 equations, 2 figures)

This paper contains 19 sections, 4 theorems, 25 equations, 2 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Problem Setup
  3. System Model
  4. Vertiports
  5. Fleet Operators
  6. Problem Formulation
  7. Mechanism Design
  8. Mechanism
  9. Theoretical Analysis
  10. Optimization Algorithm
  11. Auxiliary Graph
  12. Mixed Binary Linear Program Formulation
  13. Reduction to Mixed Binary Linear Program
  14. Discussions
  15. Connections to Existing Mechanisms
  16. ...and 4 more sections

Key Result

Theorem 3.3

The proposed mechanism $\bar{M} := (\bar{x}, \bar{p})$, defined by (eq: AllocationMultipleCapacity) and (eq: paymentMC) is IC, IR, and SWM.

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: Schematic representation of the air traffic network with a service provider tasked with coordinating the movement of aircraft of various fleet operators between vertiports in its domain. Each vertiport has a constraint on the number of arriving aircraft, departing aircraft, and parked aircraft.
  • Figure 2: Auxiliary graph $\bar{G}$ constructed from an ATN with two vertiports and one aircraft over three time slots.

Theorems & Definitions (14)

  • Definition 2.1: Social Welfare
  • Remark 2.2
  • Remark 3.1
  • Remark 3.2
  • Theorem 3.3
  • proof
  • Remark 4.1
  • Lemma 4.2
  • proof
  • Proposition 4.3
  • ...and 4 more