A study of Capacity Regulations to define European Air Traffic Management Network States

Abstract

The European Air Traffic Management Network is unique in its complexity due to numerous stakeholders, airspace configurations and accommodated traffic volumes. Such a complexity challenges both tactical visibility and the network resiliency in general. Therefore we reviewed different perspectives of resiliency and robustness to explore advantages of performance variability in understanding network states. The methodology is based on capturing the emergent disruptions as drivers of performance variability. We claim that capacity regulations reveal restorative mechanisms for tactical planning. Consequently, we conducted statistical evaluations to provide quantitative measures for network state definitions. The methodology is even able to distinguish non-nominal disruptions to either crisis or critical states. The proposed approach is then demonstrated by a data sample covering six months. Furthermore to assess the severity of nonnominal states, we estimated probability distributions of different regulation types. The study is concluded by addressing long term network resiliency based on estimated probability distributions.