Airspace Sectorization By Constraint Programming

—In this paper we consider the Airspace Sectorization Problem (ASP) where airspace has to be partitioned into a number of sectors, each sector being assigned to a team of air traffic controllers. The objective of ASP is to balance the controllers’ workload among the sectors and to minimize the coordination workload between adjacent sectors. This problem is closely related to Graph Partitioning problems. However, some specific constraints have to be taken into account (e.g., aircraft can not enter twice the same sector; aircraft cannot stay less than a given amount of time in each sector crossed, sectors cannot be fragmented etc.) and they make it difficult to use the most popular Graph Partitioning techniques of the literature. To solve the ASP, we introduce a constraintprogramming formulation that, while respecting all specific constraints, can compute optimal solution for "small" instances of problem. A heuristic based on the notion of gain of Kernighan/Lin algorithm fo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: RIVF
• Authors: Huy Trandac, Philippe Baptiste, Vu Duong
• Keywords: Airspace Sectorization Problem, Graph Partitioning, RIVF 2003, RIVF 2007, Specific Constraints