Flights Assignment to Controllers in Flight Centric Operation

This study is in the field of Air Traffic Flow Management and considers mainly the pre-tactical planning level of air traffic flows where their global balance is already fixed (flows structures and levels, control sectors and capacity) and where flights are supposed to be treated on an individual basis in the space between the different departure/arrival airports according to the flight centric operational concept. A measure of the criticality of the separation between two aircraft is considered to build a measure of the complexity of traffic around each flight, leading to the evaluation of the resulting workload for a controller. This allows to formulate an optimal assignment problem of flights crossing an extended control area to the traffic controllers, where interactions between flights assigned to different controllers are minimized. To cope with this combinatorial problem, a heuristic approach is developed and illustrated with a medium scale instance of the problem.