AIRSPACE SECTORIZATION BASED ON THE VORONOI DIAGRAM OF AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL POINTS

Abstract

Owing to the increase in worldwide aviation demand, it is predicted that the air traffic volume will exceed the capacity of existing air traffic systems, and air traffic safety regulations will be violated. This research proposes a new airspace sectorization method that reduces the workloads of air traffic controllers. To achieve high controllability of air traffic, it is important to place the borderlines of sectors far from the control points on air routes and to keep the shapes of sectors simple.
This study attempts to construct sectors as sets of the contiguous Voronoi polygons of air traffic control points on air routes. The characteristic of Voronoi polygons guarantees the segregation of the borderlines from the points. Thus, an airspace sectorization problem is formulated as a minimization of the sum of squares of the sector's workloads by seeking combinations of contiguous Voronoi polygons. We solve this problem using simulated annealing and by setting the constraints on the shape simplicity of sectors. The applicability of the proposed method is confirmed through the analysis of flight tracking data in Japan. Results from this study show successful sectorization output that has a smaller maximum workload index value than the present sectorization.