Genetic Algorithms for Automatic Regrouping of Air Traffic Control Sectors

The flow of air traffic generates a workload for the air traffic controllers in charge of the airspace who must ensure the safety of each flight. A single controller is not able to manage all this workload and the airspace is partitioned into several sectors, each of them being assigned to a controller. When the number of aircraft present in the sky decreases, the sectors are gathered together into groups to reduce the number of controllers in operation. Nowadays, this regrouping is performed empirically by airspace experts. In this paper, we show how genetic algorithms can be used to compute a balanced regrouping of air traffic control sectors to optimally reduce the number of controller teams during daily low flow periods.