26th INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF THE AERONAUTICAL SCIENCES DEFINING CRITICAL POINTS FOR DYNAMIC AIRSPACE CONFIGURATION

Airspace boundaries are designed around air traf-fic flows and their crossing and merge points to reduce controller workload and maximize capac-ity. Redesigning airspace boundaries today is a lengthy process, heavily dependent on past ex-perience and expert judgment. Therefore, the airspace boundaries remain fairly static and traf-fic flows tend to adhere to current airways. Traf-fic flows could be made more efficient by allow-ing them to change more dynamically adapting to congestion and weather. This would require airspace boundaries to be redesigned dynami-cally. This paper introduces a method for extract-ing the cross and merge points between dominant traffic flows from flight trajectories. These cross and merge points define a more flexible structure around which dynamic airspace boundaries may be designed. To evaluate the method, a set of cross and merge points are compared with current airway intersection points and airspace bound-aries. Results show that critical points from flight tracks are comparable to airway intersections. This comparison suggests cross and merge points based on forecast trajectories and constraints may be useful for designing dynamic airspace bound-aries for the future air transportation system.