Complexity Metrics for Moving Sectors

Moving sectors are a crucial element of efficient flow-centric air traffic flow management, enabling the efficient integration of prioritized flights and providing dynamic flow structures. This study establishes a foundation for determining the complexity of air traffic within moving sectors. Present air traffic flow management depends on sector-based approaches, with air traffic controller workload being a primary limitation on airspace capacity. Air traffic complexity, airspace design, and operational concepts affect controller workload. Introducing moving sectors for prioritized traffic flows challenges existing complexity assessment metrics. A comprehensive analysis of available metrics revealed that only a limited number could be reproduced and adapted to assess the complexity of moving sectors. Twenty-five significant factors were identified and aggregated into five complexity metrics. Six moving sector configurations were derived using air traffic scenarios in the Singapore flight information region. The absence of an operational concept for the prioritized traffic flows prevented human-in-the-loop experiments from assessing controller workload and taskload. However, fifteen air traffic controllers provided expert evaluations of the air traffic scenarios, which were subsequently compared with the computed complexity metrics. Mitigation strategies, such as adjusted arrival times and adapted traffic flows, are implemented to align the traffic within moving sectors and reduce air the traffic within moving sectors complexity. The findings reveal variability in complexity metrics and controller assessments, demonstrating a modest linear correlation (R $2 =0.18$ ). The five introduced metrics capture certain aspects of complexity, which will be validated in upcoming validation experiments applying the operational concept of moving sectors.