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Air Traffic Management
Project: 4D Cells and Contingency Planning
In a project with the EuroControl Experimental Centre![[External link]](/images/qbullets/remote.gif "External link") from 2008 to 2013, we aim:
- to extend our previous project (see below) to the whole European civil aviation (ECAC) airspace, initially divided into a regular grid of box-shaped 4D cells rather than the current sectorisation, and using load / capacity as a metric rather than some form of traffic complexity [HBFP09];
- to generate automatically contingency plans (see upper left corner here), which are to be carried out in the event of a long-term computer failure in tactical flow management (ETFMS).
Project: Air-Traffic Complexity Resolution in Multi-Sector Planning
In a project with EuroControl headquarters over 2004 and 2005, we effectively modelled and efficiently solved a problem of reducing and rebalancing the traffic complexities of a multi-sector airspace, and published this work at the ATM Seminar 2007 and in the JATM journal [FPÅ+07c,b,a] [Slides![[PDF document]](/images/qbullets/acrobat.gif "PDF document") ] [more recent Slides].
The traffic complexity of a sector was defined in a prior project (in which we did not participate) to be a weighted sum of the following parameters:
- Number of flights within the sector
- Number of flights near the border within the sector
- Number of flights on non-level segments within the sector
The allowed forms of (subliminal) complexity resolution are:
- Take-off: Changing the take-off times of not yet airborne flights
- Speed: Changing the remaining approach times into the chosen multi-sector airspace of already airborne flights by slight speed adjustments within the two layers of feeder sectors around that airspace
- Level: Changing the levels of passage over way-points in that airspace
Experiments with actual European flight profiles obtained from the Central Flow Management Unit (CFMU) show that these forms of complexity resolution can lead to significant complexity reductions and rebalancing:
- Reduction: Complexity can be reduced by any combination of:
- Reprofiling flights into less complex sectors
- Reprofiling flights away from sector boundaries
- Reprofiling flights onto level segments
- Non-Zero Sum:
- Take-off and speed resolutions do not just transfer complexity to adjacent multi-sectors, because a parameter controls the percentage of flights that are to be kept within the considered multi-sector.
- Level and speed resolutions can reduce the complexity of a sector without increasing it elsewhere.
- Rebalancing: Current flight profiles often yield huge complexity discrepancies among sectors, but complexity resolution addresses this.
Resources
- Authorities
- EuroControl, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, headquartered in Brussels, Belgium
- Luftfartsverket, the Swedish Civil Aviation Administration, in Norrköping, Sweden
- FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, USA
- ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization
- Research
- ACARE, the Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe
- CFMU, the Central Flow Management Unit of EuroControl
- EASN, the European Aeronautics Science Network
- EEC, the EuroControl Experimental Centre, in Brétigny, France
- EEC Innovative Studies management team at EEC
- EEC Long-Term Investigation management team at EEC
- ERASMUS, the En-Route Air Traffic Soft Management Ultimate System
- LOTA, the Laboratoire d'Optimisation du Trafic Aérien, at the École Nationale de l'Aviation Civile, Toulouse, France
- NEXTOR, (US) National Center of Excellence for Aviation Operations Research
- ONERA, the French aerospace lab
- PEGASUS, the Partnership of a European Group of Aeronautics and Space UniversitieS
- SESAR JU, the SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) Joint Undertaking with the European Commission
- SESAR Master Plan, the European ATM Master Plan Portal
- SESAR, the SESAR page at EuroControl
- SESAR, the SESAR page at the Air Transport Portal of the European Commission
- Events
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