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Projecte llegit

Títol: Improvements in Sectorization Optimizer within the Dynamic Airspace Configuration Concept

Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:

Director/a: BARRADO MUXÍ, CRISTINA

Departament: DAC

Títol: Improvements in Sectorization Optimizer within the Dynamic Airspace Configuration Concept

Data inici oferta: 17-02-2022     Data finalització oferta: 17-10-2022


Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    GR ENG SIST AEROESP
    GR ENG TELEMÀTICA
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: Fora UPC    
 
        Supervisor/a extern: ADRIAN FABIO BRACERO
        Institució/Empresa: CRIDA
        Titulació del Director/a: ---
 
Paraules clau:
DAC, optimizer, post-processing, capacity, occupancy, sector, ATM
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
The Dynamic Airspace Configuration (DAC) concept goal is to create more flexible airspace designs and configurations as a way to increase capacity and balance a fluctuating traffic demand. This modifies the conception of an airspace comprised of fixed volumes to one using a bigger quantity of building blocks and/or flexible boundaries.
In the Spanish Airspace, DAC has been approached within several SESAR projects such as COTTON, W1-PJ08 and just recently W2-PJ09. In the latter, the Madrid ACC was redesigned following DAC principles. Its current sectors were slightly reshaped and, where the size allowed it, split into two Elementary Sectors. Moreover, some buffer zones (or Shareable Airspace Blocks) were created in some of the sector boundaries in order to be interchanged according to their traffic demand. Finally, four vertical cut levels were added to the fixed FL345/FL325 level cut.
The aim of this thesis is to assess whether the DAC concept is fitted in the Spanish airspace. Specifically if the provision of four different level cuts could be a good capacity measure in the most congested sectors. In order to do that, the current sectors from Madrid ACC and Barcelona ACC will be cut at FL325, FL345, FL365 and FL375. Next, applying a sectorization optimizer, new sectorizations will be found using these new sectors and compared with real situations to find whether this could lead to more airspace capacity.
 
Overview (resum en anglès):

The Dynamic Airspace Configuration (DAC) concept goal is to create more flexible airspace designs and configurations as a way to improve airspace use and absorb the increasing traffic demand. This modifies the conception of an airspace comprised of fixed volumes to one using a bigger quantity of building blocks and/or flexible boundaries. This translates into an increase in the number of possible configurations, which results in the creation of a large-scale optimization problem.

To tackle this problem, CRIDA developed a sectorization optimizer ¿SECTORIA¿ which ranks all the possible configurations for a defined time and airspace in terms of occupancy and selects the optimal one.

The aim of this thesis is to progress the tool in order to bring it closer to an operational environment. In particular, an improvement in its capacity constraint is added in order to obtain optimal solutions in all cases. A post-processing tool is also developed to refine the optimizer results and obtain more accurate configuration plans.

The validation of these improvements is then carried out in two use cases: current sectorization in Madrid ACC Route 1 and a DAC sectorization of the same airspace, considering the addition of vertical cuts. The samples of traffic used are corresponding to the dates June 22nd, July 3rd, August 3rd and February 13th, 2019.

The first feature is validated comparing the results obtained with and without the improvement, whereas the post-processing tool results are compared with the configuration plan opened with the current airspace design on the days of study and with a blind test performed on a Subject Matter Expert (SME). Results from the first validation show a better handling of inevitable overload, leading SECTORIA to provide more feasible solutions. On the other hand, the post-processing tool shows promising results, showing improvements in ATC hours which can reach up to 30\%. Conclusions and future work are then described following the analysis of the results.

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