Future airspace design by dynamic sectorization

Abstract

The future airspace has to provide a reliable infrastructure and operational concept to ensure efficient and safe operations considering both flight-centric operations and the integration of new entrants. We propose an approach for a dynamic sectorization to manage the air traffic demand and flow appropriately. Our dynamic sectorization results in enhancements of the current operational structure (less deviation in controller task load) and leads to a significantly lower controller task load for the newly created airspace. Since future 4D trajectory management demands an efficient consideration of operational (e.g. temporally restricted areas), ecological (e.g. contrail prevention) and economic (e.g. functional airspace blocks) constraints, our dynamic sectorization method contributes to the highly flexible use of current and future airspace. In this paper, we provide an overview of several use cases and describe the working principle of our approach: fuzzy clustering of air traffic, Voronoi diagram for initial structures, and evolutionary algorithms for optimization.