An Agent-based Electronic Market to Help Airlines to Recover from Delays

The Airline Operations Control Center (AOCC) has the responsibility to ensure that flights meet their planned schedule or, if any problem arises, to find a viable solution that minimizes both the impact in the operational plan and its cost. The high cost of resources involved in this process (aircraft and crew members) leads to a lack of additional resources from the airline companies, implying a restricted solution space. Here, we propose an electronic market modeled as a multi-agent system where airline companies can negotiate and lease each other the required resources when solving a disruption problem, thus expanding their solution space. The proposed negotiation occurs in several rounds, where qualitative comments made by the buyer agent on proposals sent by the sellers enables these to learn how to calculate new proposals, using a case-based reasoning methodology.