A Fair, Economically-Efficient, Incentive-Aligned, Scalable Airspace Auction Mechanism for UAV Traffic Management
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in a wide range of applications such as cinematography, package delivery, and surveying. As a result, regulators have become interested in developing UAV Traffic Management (UTM) systems to coordinate UAV traffic. One possible framework for UTM is a combinatorial auction. Under this framework, airspace is modeled as a grid of space-time cells. UAV operators bid on sets of cells which collectively form flight paths for their UAVs. An ideal airspace auction should: be fair, be incentive-aligned, be scalable, allocate airspace economically-efficiently, enable price discovery, and reduce the work required to participate where possible. In this paper, we propose the first auction mechanism for airspace allocation that meets the criteria above. Our mechanism: (a) is provably economically-efficient, fair and incentive-aligned, (b) shares pricing information with bidders and (c) has features which reduce the burden of participating. We evaluate our mechanism on scenarios based on a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) case study and find that it can scale to 26,000 bids.