Designing Extended Air Traffic Control Areas

This article considers the construction of extended air traffic control areas to allow the implementation of a new concept of air traffic control (ATC), Flight Centric Operations, where ATC controllers are assigned a subset of flights over large areas instead of all the traffic entering a reduced control sector. This study considers subdividing the upper airspace into functional airspace blocks (FABs), using the FIRs (Flight Information Regions) as the basic building units. This results in a multi-objective optimization problem which is formulated as a constrained assignment problem.  A greedy heuristic is proposed to generate candidate solutions. The African continent is taken as case study and four scenarios built from different air transportation hubs are considered.