A multi-objective evolutionary method for Dynamic Airspace Re-sectorization using sectors clipping and similarities

Dynamic Airspace Sectorization (DAS) is a future concept in Air Traffic Management. Its main goal is to increase airspace capacity by reshaping - thus optimizing - airspace sector boundaries based on the specifics of different air traffic situations, weather conditions and other factors. The primary objective for the optimization is to balance and reduce the workload of Air Traffic Controllers (ATCs). Many researchers have made efforts in this topic in the past years. However, air traffic changes continually, and DAS has to be adaptive to each change; be it in terms of aircraft density, dynamic routes, fleet mix, etc. Therefore, instead of sectorizing the airspace each time a change occurs, we should re-sectorize it by maintaining maximum similarities between each sectorization. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective evolutionary computation methodology to re-sectorize an airspace. We use a similarity measure between the existing sectorization and the re-sectorization as an objective to maximize during the evolution.We test the methodology with different air traffic conditions with four objective functions: minimize ATC task load standard deviation, maximize average flight sector time, maximize the minimum distance between traffic crossing points and sector boundaries, and maximize the similarity of two airspace sectorizations. Experimental results show that our re-sectorization method is able to perform airspace re-sectorization under different changes in the air traffic, while satisfying the predefined objectives.