Optimization Approach to Support the Grouping and Scheduling of Air Traffic Control Sectors

Abstract

Congestion in the European airspace calls for measures to make best use of the available capacity. The grouping and scheduling of sectors to minimize flight delays is one of these measures. This paper introduces the decision problem of grouping and scheduling air traffic control sectors and proposes a generic framework to represent the interactions between the air traffic sectors and the flight demands. The representation is a bipartite directed graph denoted as Sector-Flight Network (SFN) where two types of nodes are defined, the sector and the flight nodes. All the existing interactions between these two types of nodes are detailed in a simple and comprehensive form. Based on this representation a mathematical formulation is proposed to address the problem of grouping and scheduling Air-Traffic Control (ATC) sectors. The model provides the grouping and scheduling of sectors during a given time interval accounting for controller availability and sector capacity constraints so as to minimize flight delays. The possibility of optimizing the number of air traffic controllers is also considered. This approach leads to an integer programming model that is solved using a standard branch-and-bound method. The model is tested on two examples: a subset of French airspace and the Lisbon Area Control Center (ACC) airspace. Conclusions on the appropriateness of the model are taken and further improvements identified.KeywordsPlanning HorizonFlow ManagementElementary SectorFlight PlanSector CapacityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.