Noncooperative Coordination for Decentralized Air Traffic Management
This work addresses the challenge of coordinating self-interested stakeholders in safety-critical air traffic systems, where centralized or cooperative models are inadequate.
The paper develops a noncooperative coordination framework for decentralized air traffic management, designing incentives and signals to shape individual optimality without enforcement. It advances scalable equilibrium engineering, decentralized mechanism design, and structured dynamics with convergence guarantees.
Decentralized air traffic management requires coordination among self-interested stakeholders operating under shared safety and capacity constraints, where conventional centralized or implicitly cooperative models do not adequately capture this setting. We develop a unified perspective on noncooperative coordination, in which system-level outcomes emerge by designing incentives and assigning signals that reshape individual optimality rather than imposing cooperation or enforcement. We advance this framework along three directions: scalable equilibrium engineering via reduced-rank and uncertainty-aware correlated equilibria, decentralized mechanism design for equilibrium selection without enforcement, and structured noncooperative dynamics with convergence guarantees. Beyond these technical contributions, we discuss core design principles that govern incentive-compatible coordination in decentralized systems. Together, these results establish a foundation for scalable, robust coordination in safety-critical air traffic systems.