In a terminal airspace, aircraft from various directions merge into a single stream for landing. When arriving traffic volume is high in the terminal airspace, air traffic controllers generally manually direct the heading or altitude of arriving aircraft in order to shorten flight distance or maintain separation requirements between aircraft; this is a process called radar vectoring. However, this can lead to considerably high controller workload due to continuous monitoring of aircraft, increased communication with pilots, and uncertainty in estimation of landing times. This paper presents a scheduling algorithm for arrivals that are radar-vectored in a busy terminal airspace. The proposed algorithm clusters historical arrival trajectories in the terminal airspace, based on the similarity of trajectory characteristics such as position, speed, and heading. Then, a group of vectoring patterns is generated for each arrival fix as an off-line process. In real-time operations, the algorithm assigns each arriving aircraft to a vectoring pattern and schedules the order of landing in a greedy manner while considering minimum separation requirements between aircraft. The proposed algorithm was applied to one-month historical data of Jeju International Airport, and the results show that the algorithm efficiently schedules arriving aircraft to form a single flow to a runway and reduces the amount of excessive vectoring. The proposed algorithm can also support decision making of terminal controllers by providing estimation of landing times and suggesting clustered vectoring patterns and sequences of landing.
Arrival Scheduling Algorithm in Terminal Airspace
2019-09-01
1058327 byte
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
Modeling Arrival Flight Times within the Terminal Airspace
Transportation Research Record | 2021
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