Evaluation of User Gaming Strategies in the Future National Airspace System

Traffic flow management decision making is increasingly collaborative, including users and their preferences. This trend is expected to continue as the National Airspace System (NAS) is improved. This inclusion of users in the inner loop decision could have the unintended consequence of encouraging the use of gaming strategies. This paper describes a study of user gaming concepts in the future NAS that can influence traffic flow efficiency. We design multiple experiments to evaluate the NAS performance when both advanced traffic flow management and user decision-making models are implemented. NAS gaming is a complex problem in a relatively high dimensional problem space and we were unable to find low dimensional generalizations to characterize such gaming problems. Our results suggest there can be significant Airline Operations Center (AOC) interactions and even minor strategy variants can produce significant performance differences. Our results do suggest four qualitative outcome categories which we refer to as egalitarian, utilitarian, aggressor and spoiler. These categories are helpful in describing and grouping the impact of the gaming actions. We also discuss more complicated dynamic and hybrid strategies, and the possibility of race to the bottom scenarios.