Noncooperative Virtual Queue Coordination via Uncertainty-Aware Correlated Equilibria

Correlated equilibria enable a coordinator to influence the self-interested agents by recommending actions that no player has an incentive to deviate from. However, the effectiveness of this mechanism relies on accurate knowledge of the agents' cost structures. When cost parameters are uncertain, the recommended actions may no longer be incentive compatible, allowing agents to benefit from deviating from them. We study a chance-constrained correlated equilibrium problem formulation that accounts for uncertainty in agents' costs and guarantees incentive compatibility with a prescribed confidence level. We derive sensitivity results that quantify how uncertainty in individual incentive constraints affects the expected coordination outcome. In particular, the analysis characterizes the value of information by relating the marginal benefit of reducing uncertainty to the dual sensitivities of the incentive constraints, providing guidance on which sources of uncertainty should be prioritized for information acquisition. The results further reveal that increasing the confidence level is not always beneficial and can introduce a tradeoff between robustness and system efficiency. Numerical experiments demonstrate this tradeoff: CC-CE reduces realized coordination cost by up to 35% at intermediate confidence levels, while the proposed information-gain metric consistently identifies effective uncertainty sources to reduce.

Airport landside traffic centers connect terminal arrivals with taxis, ride-hailing vehicles, private cars, buses, metro services, parking facilities, and terminal-area roadways. Peak arrivals can create coupled congestion across passenger queues, vehicle queues, pickup berths, storage areas, and access roads. This study proposes a QUBO-inspired computational framework for bottleneck diagnosis and dynamic dispatch in this setting. Shanghai Pudong International Airport and Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport serve as case airports. A five-minute state model links passenger arrivals, vehicle supply, pickup berth service, vehicle storage, and road capacity. Bottleneck diagnosis uses service intensity, road demand saturation, bottleneck frequency, queue severity, shadow-price leverage, and a composite congestion severity index. Two dispatch schemes are tested under consistent demand inputs: finite-action model predictive control and quadratic-unconstrained-binary-optimization-inspired simulated annealing. In the strong-peak baseline scenario, the QUBO-inspired method reduces the final passenger queue from 3445 to 2477 passengers at Shanghai Pudong and from 2053 to 1482 passengers at Hangzhou Xiaoshan. Case results indicate different dominant bottlenecks. Shanghai Pudong is more affected by road saturation, whereas Hangzhou Xiaoshan is more affected by pickup berth service. Robustness tests under demand, supply, service, road-capacity, modal-share, and random-noise perturbations show retained queue-reduction benefits under the tested uncertainty levels.

Decentralized air traffic management systems offer a scalable alternative to centralized control, but often assume high levels of cooperation. In practice, such assumptions frequently break down since airspace sectors operate independently and prioritize local objectives. We address the problem of sector overload in decentralized air traffic management by proposing a regulated decentralized protocol that models self-interested behaviors based on best response dynamics. Each sector adjusts the departure times of flights under its control to reduce its own congestion, without requiring centralized joint optimization. A tunable cooperativeness factor models the degree to which each sector accounts for overload in other sectors, while a minimal admissibility rule prevents local updates from creating new overloads. We prove that the proposed protocol satisfies a potential game structure, ensuring that best response dynamics converge to a pure Nash equilibrium under this restriction. In addition, we identify a sufficient condition under which an overload-free solution corresponds to a global minimizer of the potential function. Numerical experiments using 24 hours of European flight data demonstrate that the proposed algorithm substantially reduces overload even with only minimal cooperation between sectors, while maintaining scalability and achieving solution quality comparable to the centralized benchmark.