DEFINING CRITICAL POINTS FOR DYNAMIC AIRSPACE CONFIGURATION

摘要

Airspace boundaries are designed around air traffic Hows and their crossing and merge points to reduce controller workload and maximize capacity. Redesigning airspace boundaries today is a lengthy process, heavily dependent on past experience and expert judgment. Therefore, the airspace boundaries remain fairly static and traffic flows tend to adhere to current airways. Traffic flows could be made more efficient by allowing them to change more dynamically adapting to congestion and weather. This would require ' airspace boundaries to be redesigned dynamically. This paper introduces a method for extracting the cross and merge points between dominant traffic flows from flight trajectories. These cross and merge points define a more flexible structure around which dynamic airspace boundaries may be designed. To evaluate the method, a set of cross and merge points are compared with current airway intersection points and airspace boundaries. Results show that critical points from flight tracks are comparable to airway intersections. This comparison suggests cross and merge points based on forecast trajectories and constraints may be useful for designing dynamic airspace boundaries for the future air transportation system.