Airspace daily operational sectorization by fuzzy logic

From the point of view of Air Traffic Control the airspace of a country or region are divided into sectors. Each sector is served by a team of controllers. Depending on traffic characteristics (volume, scenario, aircraft types, etc.) several sectors can be merged into one sector or work independently. When the traffic characteristics are known in advance (planned or forecasted) the problem that arises is to determine the number of open sectors during a given time period (day, week, etc.) so that the traffic requesting service can be served with an acceptable work load for the controllers. In this paper, a decision support tool based on fuzzy logic is proposed to solve the above-mentioned problem. The proposed decision support tool is illustrated by a numerical example from real life. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.