Purpose

Airspace sectorization is an important task, which has a significant impact in the everyday work of air control services. Especially in recent years, because of the constant increase in air traffic, existing airspace sectorization techniques have difficulties to tackle the large air traffic volumes, creating imbalanced sectors and uneven workload distribution among sectors. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new approach to find optimal airspace sectorization balancing the traffic controller workload between sectors, subject to airspace requirements.

Design/methodology/approach

A constraint programming (CP) model called equitable airspace sectorization problem (EQASP) relies on ordered weighted averaging (OWA) multiagent optimization and the parallel portfolio architecture has been developed, which integrates the equity into an existing CP approach (Trandac et al., 2005). The EQASP was evaluated and compared with the method of Trandac et al. (2005), according to the quality of workload balancing between sectors and the resolution performance. The comparison was achieved using real air traffic low-altitude network data sets of French airspace for five flight information regions for 24 h a day and the Algerian airspace for three various periods (off peak hours, peak hours and 24 h).

Findings

It has been demonstrated that the proposed EQASP model, which is based on OWA multicriteria optimization method, significantly improved both the solving performance and the workload equity between sectors, while offering strong theoretical properties of the balancing requirement. Interestingly, when solving hard instances, our parallel sectorization tool can provide, at any time, a workable solution, which satisfies all geometric constraints of sectorization.

Practical implications

This study can be used to design well-balanced air sectors in terms of workload between control units in the strategic phase. To fulfil the airspace users’ constraints, one can refer to this study to assess the capacity of each air sector (especially the overloaded sectors) and then adjust the sector’s shape to respond to the dynamic changes in traffic patterns.

Social implications

This theoretical and practical approach enables the development and support of the definition of the “Air traffic management (ATM) Concept Target” through improvements in human factors specifically (balancing workload across sectors), which contributes to raising the level of capacity, safety and efficiency (SESAR Vision of ATM 2035).

Originality/value

In their approach, the authors proposed an OWA-based multiagent optimization model, ensuring the search for the best equitable solution, without requiring user-defined balancing constraints, which enforce each sector to have a workload between two user-defined bounds (W_min, W_max).

中文翻译：

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基于约束规划和OWA聚合的公平优化空域分区

目的

空域分区是一项重要任务，对空管服务的日常工作产生重大影响。尤其是近年来，由于空中交通的持续增长，现有的空域分区技术难以应对大量的空中交通，造成部门不平衡和部门间工作量分配不均。本文的目的是提出一种新方法，以根据空域要求，找到最佳的空域分区，以平衡各部门之间的交通管制员工作量。

设计/方法/方法

一种称为公平空域扇区化问题（EQASP）的约束规划（CP）模型依赖于有序加权平均（OWA）多主体优化，并且已经开发了并行投资组合架构，该架构将股权整合到了现有的CP方法中（Trandac等，2005）。 ）。对EQASP进行了评估，并与Trandac等人的方法进行了比较。（2005年），根据部门之间的工作负载平衡质量和解决方案性能。使用法国领空的真实空中交通低空网络数据集（针对五个飞行信息区域，每天24小时）和阿尔及利亚领空的三个不同时期（非高峰时段，高峰时段和24 h）进行比较。

发现

结果表明，基于OWA多准则优化方法的EQASP模型可以显着提高部门之间的求解性能和工作量公平性，同时提供了强大的平衡要求的理论特性。有趣的是，在解决困难的情况时，我们的并行分区工具可以随时提供可行的解决方案，满足分区的所有几何约束。

实际影响

根据战略阶段中控制单元之间的工作量，该研究可用于设计均衡的航空部门。为了满足空域用户的限制，可以参考这项研究来评估每个航空部门（特别是超负荷的部门）的容量，然后调整部门的形状以响应交通模式的动态变化。

社会影响

这种理论和实践方法可通过改善人为因素（平衡各部门的工作量）来发展和支持“空中交通管理（ATM）概念目标”的定义，从而有助于提高能力，安全性和效率水平（SESAR ATM 2035愿景）。

创意/价值

在他们的方法中，作者提出了一个基于OWA的多主体优化模型，该模型可确保寻求最佳的公平解决方案，而无需用户定义的平衡约束，该约束使每个部门的工作量在两个用户定义的界限之间（W _min， W _max）。