Temporal and Spatial Distribution of Airspace Complexity for Air Traffic Controller Workload-Based Sectorization

Yousefi, Arash; Donohue, George

doi:10.2514/6.2004-6455

Cited by 57 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 9 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…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

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

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

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Considering this, the side of each hexagonal cell was calculated to be 0.4 deg latitude and longitude, which approximately translates to 24nm.The entire US airspace is bound in a rectangle. The Cartesian coordinates of the topleft corner correspond to 50° latitude and -130° longitude and the bottom-right corner correspond to 24° latitude and -64° longitude [1]. Figure 3 below shows the decomposition of the NAS into hexagonal cells.…”

Section: Adp Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yousefi et al [1] designed an integer programming approach to partition airspace based on optimal controller workload. The airspace was discretized into hexagonal cells and the workload value for each cell was determined via simulation.…”

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

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

“…If the Laplacian matrix describes two sub-graphs, two of the eigenvalues will be zero. Thus, the second eigenvalue 2 Observe that the first eigenvalue of zero indicates that this Laplacian matrix describes a single graph. The second eignvalue is non-zero, which confirms that the graph is connected.…”

Section: B Flow Graph Partitioningmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Weighted-Graph Approach for Dynamic Airspace Configuration

Martinez

Nationale

Chatterji

et al. 2007

AIAA Guidance, Navigation and Control Conference and Exhibit

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A method for partitioning airspace into smaller regions based on a peak traffic-counts metric is described. The three setup steps consist of 1) creating a network flow graph, 2) creating an occupancy grid composed of grid cells of specified size for discretizing the airspace and 3) assigning the grid cells to the nodes of the network flow graph. Both the occupancy grid and the grid cell assignment to nodes are computationally realized using matrices. During the run phase of the method, the network flow graph is partitioned into its two sub-graphs and these two sub-graphs and then partitioned into their two sub-graphs, and so on till a termination criterion is met. Weights of the sub-graphs are computed by summing the number of aircraft in each grid cell associated with the nodes of the sub-graphs at each time instant. This process is accomplished by using the occupancy and assignment matrices created during the setup step. The final weight is obtained as the maximum count over a time period. Spectral bisection is then used to split the sub-graph with the maximum weight into its two sub-graphs. Recursive application of the spectral bisection method and weight computation results in the final set of sub-graphs. The grid cells associated with each sub-graph then represent the geometry of the associated sector. Results of sectorization of the airspace over the continental United States are provided to demonstrate the merits and the limitations of the method. The weighted-graph technique created larger sectors in regions of light-traffic and smaller sectors in regions of heavy-traffic. Peak traffic-counts in the sectors were found to be within the range of the Monitor Alert Parameters specified in the Enhanced Traffic Management System.

show abstract

Temporal and Spatial Distribution of Airspace Complexity for Air Traffic Controller Workload-Based Sectorization

Cited by 57 publications

References 9 publications

Interaction of Airspace Partitions and Traffic Flow Management Delay

Interaction of Airspace Partitions and Traffic Flow Management Delay

Static sectorization approach to dynamic airspace configuration using approximate dynamic programming

A Weighted-Graph Approach for Dynamic Airspace Configuration

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About