Design and Implementation of a Secure Auction System for Air Transport Slots

Abstract

The increasing demand for air transport, as being forecasted for the next decade, and the difficulties associated with the expansion of existing infrastructures, have fostered the interest towards market-based mechanisms aimed at a more efficient use of available resources. Such mechanisms nevertheless require stakeholders to disclose private information, which can be used to recover key elements of their commercial strategies. A solution can be found in Secure Multi-party Computation, a set of algorithms and protocols aimed at performing computations over private data sets in a secure way. In this contribution we describe the design and implementation of an airport slot trading platform based on secure computation. It allows different stakeholders to participate in auctions without having to publicly disclose their bid prices, thus ensuring the security of private (business related) information. Finally, several challenges, in terms of validation and expansion of the system, are presented and discussed.