Model estimation of air traffic control sectors capacity for solving the air traffic flow management problem

Abstract

Civil aviation air traffic undergoes many random disturbances. Air traffic controllers watch the real traffic and ensure that it is free from collision hazards in the whole airspace — the ATC sector — under their control. The ATFM service takes care that the flow capacity in each sector, called capacity of the air traffic sector, is not exceeded. In the paper an original method of model estimation of the capacity of the designed ATC sectors is described. In this method an experimentally established statistical relationship between the random variables of control load and the air traffic density is used. The capacity of a sector was found from the joint probability distribution of such a two-dimensional random variable model determined as a quanti le of adequate order. This method was verified in practice by determining the capacity of the designed new ATC sectors in FIR Warsaw.