Trust of Airspace Configuration Transition Concerning the Fluctuation of Air Traffic

Dynamic Airspace Configuration (DAC) has caught attention in tackling the increasing demand for flight operation in the National Airspace System (NAS). In recent years, sectorisation methods, such as the Voronoi diagram, dynamic programming, genetic algorithm, have been developed to find the optimal sector design. However, by restructuring the airspace, most design methods reduce the airline’s delay but increase the complexity of airspace configuration, which causes uncertainties to safe air traffic management. Furthermore, adaptive airspace reconfiguration schemes are also desired to accommodate the designs of different types of airspace. This paper presents a study exploring the concept of time-variant stability of airspace configuration transition in response to the assumed flight fluctuation. We exploited the airspace capacity in explaining the potential long-term effects caused by the graph-based airspace partitioning algorithm. According to the imbalanced distribution of air traffic, the aircraft counts of each divided sector are computed through time to estimate the workload of air traffic controllers (ATC).The number of flights in the sub-sector is computed through two months’ time length. Airspace designs from the Voronoi diagram are presented and evaluated by the airspace capacity of the ZJX ARTCC sector. Two configuration scenarios are chosen to present the algorithms’ evolving performance. The simulation results show that the existing graph partitioning method is not adapted to imbalanced traffic patterns, which does not show the potential of the reconfiguration algorithm’s robustness in response to the fluctuation of air traffic. As part of the necessary analysis we developed, we concluded the airspace sectorization for imbalanced traffic patterns and complex airspace characteristics, which provides the transferable features of airspace design between different ARTCC sectors.