Airspace Complexity Measurement An Air Traffic Control Simulation Analysis

This paper describes the results of a dynamic density (DD) human in the loop simulation as well as the DD model development activity designed to examine complexity measures DD measures presented at the US/Europe ATM 2003 Seminar were used in the analysis This study differed from the previous in three main aspects First the simulation included Reduced Vertical Separation Minima procedures Second the study focused on the Cleveland Air Route Traffic Control Center s airspace where previous study results showed the weakest correlation Third the traffic was actively controlled during the simulation whereas in the previous study audio/video replays were shown The results indicated that the DD metric performed better than the aircraft count which is a current complexity measure The new DD model performed better than the previous model for Cleveland Center Significance This research identifies airspace complexity factors which are critical to concepts such as airspace design and dynamic airspace configurations and controller workload balancing