Optimizing Successive Airspace Configurations with a Sequential A * Algorithm

International audienceIn this paper, we introduce exact tree search algorithms which explore all the possible sequences of airspace partitions , taking into account some constraints on the transitions between two successive airspace configurations. The transitions should be simple enough to allow air traffic controllers to maintain their situation awareness during the airspace configuration changes. For the same reason, once a sector is opened it should remain so for a minimum duration. The proposed method is a sequential A * algorithm with a rolling horizon. It finds a sequence of airspace configurations minimizing a cost related to the workload and the usage of manpower resources, while satisfying the transition constraints. This approach shows good results on 9 months of data from the french ATCC Aix (East), when compared with two baseline methods, one with a greedy approach and the other with no transition constraints