En-route Sector Complexity Control Strategies in Air Traffic Management

Along with the rapid development of air traffic, the contradiction between conventional air traffic management (ATM) and the increasingly complex air traffic situations is more severe, which essentially reduces the operational efficiency of air transport systems. Thus, objectively measuring the air traffic situation complexity becomes a concern in the field of ATM. Most existing studies focus on air traffic complexity assessment, and rarely on the scientific guidance of complex traffic situations. According to the projected time of aircraft arriving at the target sector boundary, we formulated two control strategies to reduce the air traffic complexity. The strategy of entry time optimization was applied to the controllable flights in the adjacent upstream sectors. In contrast, the strategy of flying dynamic speed optimization was applied to the flights in the target sector. During the process of solving complexity control models, we introduced a physical programming method. We transformed the multi-objective optimization problem involving complexity and delay to single-objective optimization problems by designing different preference function. Actual data validated the two complexity control strategies can eliminate the high-complexity situations in reality. The control strategy based on the entry time optimization was more efficient than that based on the speed dynamic optimization. A basic framework for studying air traffic complexity management was preliminarily established. Our findings will help the implementation of a complexity-based ATM.