AN EFFICIENT AND EFFECTIVE PARTITIONING ALGORITHM FOR AIR TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT

The more dense air traffic becomes the more important means to manage traffic in an efficient and secure manner become. Airspace is partitioned into sectors that are assigned to individual Air Traffic Control units (ATC units). They are responsible for monitoring aircrafts passing their sector, resolving conflicts between different aircrafts and to coordinate flights between sectors. Thereby, the number and shape of sectors should be chosen to minimize the number of required ATC units while keeping the workload for each ATC unit at bay. This is a non-trivial task as many requirements have to be considered. Based on simulation data, a method for airspace sectorization is presented that takes a detailed workload model into account and allows a horizontal and vertical partitioning. The approach is evaluated based on a real world scenario.