Abstract. We consider the Airspace Sectorization Problem (ASP) in which airspace has to be partitioned into a given number of sectors, each of which being assigned to a team of air traffic controllers. The objective is to minimize the coordination workload between adjacent sectors while balancing the total workload of controllers. Many specific constraints, including both geometrical and aircraft related constraints are taken into account. The problem is solved in a constraint programming framework. Experimental results show that our approach can be used on real life problems.

Current techniques in evolutionary synthesis of analogue and digital circuits designed at transistor level have focused on achieving the desired functional response, without paying sufficient attention to issues needed for a practical implementation of the resulting solution. No silicon fabrication of circuits with topologies designed by evolution has been done before, leaving open questions on the feasibility of the evolutionary circuit design approach, as well as on how highperformance, robust, or portable such designs could be when implemented in hardware. It is argued that moving from evolutionary 'design-for experimentation' to 'design-for-implementation' requires, beyond inclusion in the fitness function of measures indicative of circuit evaluation factors such as power consumption and robustness to temperature variations, the addition of certain evaluation techniques that are not common in conventional design. Several such techniques that were found to be useful in evolving designs for implementation are presented; some are general, and some are particular to the problem domain of transistor-level logic design, used here as a target application. The example used here is a multifunction NAND/NOR logic gate circuit, for which evolution obtained a creative circuit topology more compact than what has been achieved by multiplexing a NAND and a NOR gate. The circuit was fabricated in a 0.5 mm CMOS technology and silicon tests showed good correspondence with the simulations.

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