Introduction of moving sectors for flow-centric airspace management

The introduction of free routing, flights in urban areas, and concepts for automated flight operations demand new concepts to provide safe and efficient airspace management. As coordinated operations in airspace will reduce the controller workload, flights should be grouped according to their interventions and by their similarity in planned and predicted trajectories. These groups should be controlled by a single entity, which follows this group and coordinates interaction inside the group and with adjacent groups. We propose the concept of moving sectors as a key element for efficient and flow-centric operations. For this purpose, the fundamentals for the geometric design of the sector are developed, a complexity measure is adapted to evaluate several aircraft group constellations, and finally, different implementations are evaluated based on simulated aircraft movements in the Singapore Flight Information Region. Our results indicate that the evaluation metric is appropriate and the investigated air traffic exhibits different opportunities to integrate moving sectors. The adapted complexity metric will be validated with operators in the next step to provide a tool for automated aggregation of moving sectors.