Air traffic flow management methods: Development and testing by real-time dynamic simulation experiments

Air traffic flow management is a new means of promoting efficient and smooth flow of air traffic over a wide airspace, through collaboration with an air traffic control system that controls a wide airspace by dividing the area into a large number of enroute control sectors and terminal airspaces. This paper discusses a real-time dynamic simulation experiment, which was executed to develop an adequate air traffic flow management method, that can cope with the increase of air traffic due to the function expansion program of the Tokyo International Airport. In the experiment, a newly developed air traffic flow management console is connected to the air traffic control simulation facility, and the sectors and terminal airspace are simulated simultaneously. For air traffic flow management, a method is proposed that is a combination of the dynamic flow branching using parallel routes, which has been used effectively in the evaluation of the airspace design for the enroute control sector, and a departure regulation method. The effectiveness of the method is examined by trajectory analysis including the terminal airspace. The effect of the smoothing of the arrival traffic flow on air traffic control processing, as well as the adequate condition for transferring the arriving aircraft between the enroute control and the terminal control, are analyzed.