Sectorisation of airspace based on balanced workloads
Authors: Soh S.W. , Zhong Z.W. 
Published: December 2019

Purpose

Given the ever-growing air travel industry, there is an increasing strain on the systems that provide safe flights. Different methods have to be adopted to help to cope with the increasing demand, especially in Southeast Asia. The purpose of this study is to sectorise one existing airspace to better manage sector workloads.

Design/methodology/approach

Cambodia’s airspace was chosen for this study because it had only one sector and it was quickly approaching its limit. In this paper, after characterising the airspace, it was first bi-partitioned using the spectral clustering algorithm. The weights of the resulting subgraphs were then balanced through a weight-balancing algorithm. Also, a post-processing algorithm established the sector boundary to be drawn. The method was first carried out on one test airspace. Following the successful sectorisation of the test airspace, the actual Cambodian airspace was sectorised. The resulting two new sectors were then calculated to be able to last for approximately five years before they would reach their capacity. Hence, a further sectorisation was carried out. This resulted in four sectors, which were projected to last more than 10 years.

Findings

The method produced satisfactory results. The methodology presented is proven to be effective in achieving the sectorisation. The workloads of the new sectors obtained are balanced, and the sector boundaries are at least 15 km away from the air routes and nodes. The methodology is also general and can be applied to different scenarios. This means that applications to other airspace in the region are possible, which can further help to increase the safety, efficiency and capacity of the air traffic movement in this region.

Originality/value

This paper presents one of the approaches for airspace sector designs. The problems are clearly presented with references. The authors discuss the advantages and disadvantages of subdividing airspace and the need to sectorise Cambodia’s airspace, and present a method to solve the sectorisation problem. It is very precious to apply methodologies and algorithms to real cases. The presented method offers significant advantages such as the ease of implementation and efficiency. The problems can easily be solved using standard linear algebra algorithms. Instead of looking at the airspace as a whole, and generating new sector boundaries, our algorithm uses current sector boundaries and bisects them. Moreover, only sectors that require sectorisation would be affected. This algorithm has the advantage of maintaining the current sector boundaries to prevent radical changes to daily operations. The Voronoi diagram used in this work does not generate polygonal cells. It instead calculates the area based on pixels. The advantage of doing this is that it offers higher flexibility. Also, the sector boundary is generated based on straight lines calculated by joining the midpoints of links. This is simple and ensures that sections of the sector boundary are made up of straight, distinct lines. The authors also discuss the problems of the method and presented solutions to them.