An en route capacity optimization model based on air traffic control process

Abstract

In order to resolve the imbalance of demand-capacity and airspace congestion, improve the performance of the en route air traffic management, promote the development of air traffic control automation system in the future, this paper proposes an En route air traffic control process model from the perspective of operation requirements. Taking the minimization of operation time, instantaneous density, maximum lateral displacement and air traffic controllers' workload as the optimization objectives, the commonly used air traffic control instructions such as climb and descent and speed restriction are set as constraints, the algorithm is designed based on the air traffic control scheme, and a complete air traffic control process are modeled which outputs instructions for each aircraft. Finally, the model is applied to a case study in the northwest region of China. The simulation results show that compared with the actual operation process, the total operation time is reduced by 18.6%, the variance of the lateral displacement and the vertical separation are efficiently reduced, and the en route air traffic capacity is improved. The proposed model envisages the following two innovations: (ⅰ) the whole process of air traffic controllers' command is considered in the model, especially the control scheme and different types of instructions, and (ⅱ) the en route historical trajectory data of aircraft is used to as the key parameters of the input data to efficiently yield the acceptable results of the model. By quantifying the operation requirements of air traffic control, this model can also balance the distribution of traffic flow density, reduce the utilization rate of horizontal airspace, alleviate flight conflicts on air routes, and lessen the workload of controllers.

Keywords

• air traffic control automation
• en route capacity
• air traffic control instructions