Incorporating Workflows for Collaborative Air Traffic Management

Airports are the bottlenecks of international air traffic and are increasingly overcrowded by a constantly growing number of passengers. Amongst others, structural conditions (such as limited number of runways and parking areas) that cannot be improved are one major reason for this inefficiency. On the contrary, coordinative and procedural inefficiency (e.g., ATM stakeholder coordination) could be improved significantly. This paper describes the implementation of a negotiation system for all airport stakeholders that allows a collaborative planning and organization of air traffic. The process is supported by a planning system that can calculate future developments and thus supports basic agreements on airport management between all stakeholders (e.g., Quality of Service contracts). In this paper the realization of such a negotiation process will be described and demonstrated in single steps for a selected problem. To increase the acceptance of the negotiation process, we selected a negotiation protocol that ensures fairness and transparency in particular. Additionally, it was necessary to design the negotiation protocol in the concept phase as well as in the implementation phase as generic as possible to cover a large set of possible use cases. First experiments indicate that the work flow conceptualization is applicable to structure complex multi-user negotiations