A Weighted-Graph Approach for Dynamic Airspace Configuration

Martinez, Stephane A.; Nationale, Ecole; Chatterji, Gano B.; Sun, Dong; Bayen, Alexandre M.

doi:10.2514/6.2007-6448

Cited by 67 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…This has motivated the development of several algorithms for increasing and distributing capacity by re-partitioning of airspace into more regions of airspace, commonly referred to as sectors. [9][10][11][12][13][14] Sectors are sub-divisions of areas of any of the 20 centers in the entire United States airspace within which air traffic controllers are responsible for aircraft separation. More sectors, however, come at the cost of additional air traffic controllers and equipment for operating those sectors.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interaction of Airspace Partitions and Traffic Flow Management Delay

Palopo

Chatterji

Lee

2010

10th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations (ATIO) Conference

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To ensure that air traffic demand does not exceed airport and airspace capacities, traffic management restrictions, such as delaying aircraft on the ground, assigning them different routes and metering them in the airspace, are implemented. To reduce the delays resulting from these restrictions, revising the partitioning of airspace has been proposed to distribute capacity to yield a more efficient airspace configuration. The capacity of an airspace partition, commonly referred to as a sector, is limited by the number of flights that an air traffic controller can safely manage within the sector. Where viable, re-partitioning of the airspace distributes the flights over more efficient sectors and reduces individual sector demand. This increases the overall airspace efficiency, but requires additional resources in some sectors in terms of controllers and equipment, which is undesirable. This study examines the tradeoff of the number of sectors designed for a specified amount of traffic in a clear-weather day and the delays needed for accommodating the traffic demand. Results show that most of the delays are caused by airport arrival and departure capacity constraints. Some delays caused by airspace capacity constraints can be eliminated by re-partitioning the airspace. Analyses show that about 360 high-altitude sectors, which are approximately today's operational number of sectors of 373, are adequate for delays to be driven solely by airport capacity constraints for the current daily air traffic demand. For a marginal increase of 15 seconds of average delay, the number of sectors can be reduced to 283. In addition, simulations of traffic growths of 15% and 20% with forecasted airport capacities in the years 2018 and 2025 show that delays will continue to be governed by airport capacities. In clear-weather days, for small increases in traffic demand, increasing sector capacities will have almost no effect on delays.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interaction of Airspace Partitions and Traffic Flow Management Delay

Palopo

Chatterji

Lee

2010

10th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations (ATIO) Conference

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“…Xue, M [3] proposed an approach to redesign airspace sector based on Voronoi diagrams (a graph-partition method) and a genetic algorithm that optimizes the sectorization. Martinez et al [4] proposed a weighted-graph approach for partitioning airspace based on peak traffic-counts. The approach involved creating a network flow graph, which was further partitioned into sub-graphs till a set termination criterion was met.…”

Section: Figure 2 Atc Sectors In the Nasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Static sectorization approach to dynamic airspace configuration using approximate dynamic programming

Kulkarni¹,

Ganesan²,

Sherry³

2011

2011 Integrated Communications, Navigation, and Surveillance Conference Proceedings

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The National Airspace System (NAS) is an important and a vast resource. Efficient management of airspace capacity is important to ensure safe and systematic operation of the NAS eventually resulting in maximum benefit to the stakeholders. Dynamic Airspace Configuration (DAC) is one of the NextGen Concept of Operations (ConOps) that aims at efficient allocation of airspace as a capacity management technique.This paper is a proof of concept for the Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) approach to Dynamic Airspace Configuration (DAC) by static sectorization. The objective of this paper is to address the issue of static sectorization by partitioning airspace based on controller workload i.e. airspace is partitioned such that the controller workload is balanced between adjacent sectors. Several algorithms exist that address the issue of static restructuring of the airspace to meet capacity requirements on a daily basis. The intent of this paper is to benchmark the results of our methodology with the state-of-the-art algorithms and lay a foundation for future work in dynamic resectorization.

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“…The described network-theoretic approach builds on a growing literature on graphand network-theoretic approaches to air traffic management [11,25,26]. Relative to this literature, the main innovation here is to study the spatiotemporal impacts of disruptions from a graph-theory and network-controls perspective, and to develop models and analyses for meshed cyber, traffic, and weather dynamics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%