Controller team possibilities for sectorless air traffic management

Abstract

Sectorless air traffic management is an en-route concept, which eliminates the need for control sectors. Instead of assigning a geographic area (sector), air traffic controllers are assigned certain aircraft. Controllers are responsible for their assigned aircraft all the way from entry to exit.In previous simulations, one controller was responsible for six aircraft at the same time. As these aircraft can be located anywhere in the sectorless airspace, controllers were provided with one traffic display for each assigned aircraft.This discussion paper suggests other possibilities for providing traffic information to sectorless air traffic controllers. Instead of having one traffic display for each aircraft under control (tiled display), controllers could work with a general map, a zoom display to magnify certain traffic situations, or a combination of such displays.We revisit the concept of controller teams and explore alternatives. In addition to working alone or in pairs of executive and controller, the sectorless air traffic management concept opens possibilities for innovative teamwork. For example, there could be a team of one coordinator and several executives, or even a control-room team.This paper gives examples of new display and team ideas and discusses their respective advantages and disadvantages. We argue that the way traffic information is displayed to controllers affects their mental models and working methods. In addition, we provide results on the tiled display from previous simulations and introduce ideas for future research.

21st International Symposium on Aviation Psychology

“…This requires considerable coordination between adjacent sectors and may lead to an imbalance in traffic load (and thus workload). To mitigate these issues, Birkmeier, Tittel, and Korn (2016), among others, considered so-called flight centric or sectorless operations. Instead of coupling controllers to geographic areas, a single controller would be assigned to several flights, from departure to arrival, reducing the number of handoffs and possibly providing a better workload balance.…”

Decisions and Infrastructure (In)visibility: A Case Study

“…In particular, the coordination efforts between sectors increase significantly [5]. A common practice used to reduce this workload excess has been to decrease the size of the sectors thus creating more sectors.…”

“…For the last two decades, international bodies, practitioners and scholars in the sector have discussed an innovative approach to controlling airspace: the Sectorless scenario [5,12,13,34]. The Sectorless scenario envisages air traffic control without the conventional geography-based sectors.…”

Untangling Complexity in ASEAN Air Traffic Management through Time-Varying Queuing Models

“…The sector-less approach [3] is limited to a maximum number of six flights that an ATCo can monitor (cf. [4]). The validation scenarios show only slight improvements over the current procedures [5].…”