Validating Sectorless ATM in the Hungarian Airspace: Results of Human in The Loop Simulations

Abstract

In order to balance demand and capacity in en-route ATM, the current practice is to partition the airspace into sectors. Each sector is assigned to a pair of air traffic controllers, a team of executive and planner. This controller team is responsible for the traffic within the sector. When the workload reaches the sector capacity limit, the sector is subdivided into smaller sectors. Each of these smaller sectors is then assigned to responsible air traffic controllers, thus distributing the workload. However, an increase in the number of sectors also increases the amount of necessary coordination between controllers and handoffs from one sector to the next. Also, the time an aircraft remains in one sector and the manoeuvring space becomes smaller. Therefore, a subdivision of sectors can only be done a limited number of times before further subdivision becomes unfeasible. The concept of a sectorless ATM follows a different approach. Sectorless air traffic management (or Flight centric ATC as it is called in the SESAR context) has been researched at the German Aerospace Center DLR in close cooperation with the German ANSP DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH since 2008 and in recent years has been extended to the Hungarian Airspace together with Hungary Control. It is an en-route concept for air traffic control, where controllers are no longer in charge of geographic sectors but are assigned individual aircraft anywhere in the airspace. Controllers are responsible for the assigned aircraft from their entry into the sectorless airspace until their exit. Comprehensive validations activities were carried out successfully at Hungaro Control in Budapest in early 2019. The whole Hungarian upper-airspace was simulated using the Sectorless (or Flight Centric ATC) concept with more than ten air traffic controllers participating simultaneously in the validation trials. The validations have been run on DLR’s TrafficSim, a simulator which is capable of fast-time and real-time simulations. This paper reports about the concept in more detail and how it has been applied to the Hungarian Airspace, about the validation setup and finally about the results achieved during this validation activity.