Cleveland Center Airspace Redesign Analysis

Abstract

The sectors of Cleveland Air Route Traffic Control Center wereredesigned in 2011 in response to changes in air traffic patterns and volume. This paper presents an analysis of that redesign by contrasting the performance of the old design to the new one using historical traffic from the summer of 2010. Multiple workloadfactors are measured for each sector including one called sector loading, which is the sector’s peak aircraft count over a 15-minute time interval divided by the sector’s capacity, as specified by its Monitor Alert Parameter value. Other factors, like the number of flights near sector boundaries, are used to measure specific controller tasks that contribute to overall workload. Several of the design changes involved splitting busy sectors and combining under-utilized sectors to address traffic load imbalances. By comparing the distributions of these workload factors, the majority of these changes are shown to make the workload in the new sectors more consistent with that of other sectors in the vicinity. Furthermore, many of the changes are shown to improve the balance of workload within areas of specialization.