Noncooperative Virtual Queue Coordination via Uncertainty-Aware Correlated Equilibria

2026-02-16

AI Summary

This study addresses the coordination challenge between airport surface congestion and airlines’ strategic autonomy in departure pushback decisions by proposing an uncertainty-aware correlated equilibrium mechanism. A central coordinator issues incentive-compatible pushback recommendations, and for the first time, chance constraints are integrated into the correlated equilibrium framework to explicitly guarantee, in a probabilistic manner, airlines’ compliance under cost uncertainty. The approach elucidates the trade-offs among confidence level, deviation robustness, and cost efficiency, and leverages a low-rank structure to enable computationally efficient solution via accelerated algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that the mechanism scales to handle up to 210 pushback requests per hour and reduces cumulative delay by up to 8.9% compared to a first-come-first-served policy.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Scheduling under Uncertainty
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Sequential Decision Making

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

Collaborative virtual queueing has been proposed as a mechanism to mitigate airport surface congestion while preserving airline autonomy over aircraft-level pushback decisions. A central coordinator can regulate aggregate pushback capacity but cannot directly control which specific aircraft are released, limiting its ability to steer system-level performance. We propose a noncooperative coordination mechanism for collaborative virtual queueing based on the correlated equilibrium concept, which enables the coordinator to provide incentive-compatible recommendations on aircraft-level pushback decisions without overriding airline autonomy. To account for uncertainty in airlines'internal cost assessments, we introduce chance constraints into the correlated equilibrium formulation. This formulation provides explicit probabilistic guarantees on incentive compatibility, allowing the coordinator to adjust the confidence level with which airlines are expected to follow the recommended actions. We further propose a scalable algorithm for computing chance-constrained correlated equilibria by exploiting a reduced-rank structure. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method scales to realistic traffic levels up to 210 eligible pushbacks per hour, reduces accumulated delay by up to approximately 8.9% compared to current first-come-first-served schemes, and reveals a trade-off between confidence level, deviation robustness, and achievable cost efficiency.

Problem

• virtual queueing
• airport surface congestion
• airline autonomy
• uncertainty
• incentive compatibility

Innovation

• correlated equilibrium
• chance constraints
• virtual queueing
• noncooperative coordination
• scalable algorithm