Identification of Air Traffic Control Sectors with Common Structural Features

The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. In order to identify sectors supporting a minimum differences approach to generic airspace, traffic patterns in 360 high-altitude sectors were examined for common structural features. These structural features are used as the basis for two approaches to classifying current air traffic control sectors into groups which are expected to be similar to each other, and hence a basis for near-term deployment of generic airspace. The first classification approach is a holistic approach, based on emergent sector-wide traffic patterns in order to identify groups of sectors with shared structural features. The second, a decompositional classification approach, proposes using basic structural features (e.g. flows, merges, crosses) as building blocks, and classifies sectors based on combinations of those features. Initial classification results are presented for the holistic approach, and challenges and key steps are presented for the decompositional approach.