Towards the traffic synchronization in Central European upper airspace

One general hypothesis for future air traffic management (ATM) is that traffic in a flow shall be better organized to increase its performance in terms of capacity and delays savings. This hypothesis suggests a shift from current ATM concept, which is non-synchronized, to a synchronized system with synchronized distance separation between all aircraft evolving in a flow in order to be able to cope with future air traffic demand. This paper presents one first step towards the evaluation of operational feasibility of this concept in Central European upper airspace: the improvement of controllers' productivity through adequate task sharing in the traffic synchronization activity. Task sharing is necessary in this case because synchronization time can span over several sectors in Europe. A simple synchronization model is proposed, taking into account (i) the time duration needed to transform the non-synchronized inbound flows into synchronized ones, and (ii) the variations of conflict situations.