Bridging the predictive and adaptive issues in air traffic management: the synchronous paradigm

The SuperSector by R. Graham et al. (2002) project falls within the scope of research based on the hypothesis that the current proliferation of controlled sectors had led to a too rigid use of airspace to face with medium to long-term traffic growth. SuperSector suggests a shift of paradigm from sector-division to sector-regrouping, i.e. instead of subdividing sectors to accommodate traffic growth, SuperSector investigates a new control organization and practices from which traffic in large volume of airspace can be managed by teams of controllers with responsibilities no more restricted to sector-planning and radar-control but span from real-time traffic flow organization to conflict solving. In this way, it is expected that SuperSector can help filling the gap between long-term predictive issues of central flow management, and short-term adaptive issues of radar-control, and thus moving from an asynchronous air traffic management system to a synchronous one, from a sector-control working methods to a network and flow management one, from conflict-based control to a time-based control one. In this paper, we present the results obtained so far with SuperSector: a novel working organization based on a layered-planning mechanism and contract of services in order to perform medium-term anticipation linking the long-term predictive part of traffic flow capacity management and the short-term adaptive part of the air traffic control actions. The time-based approach and collaborative decision making mechanism associated to the contract are developed. Impacts on airspace design, flow planning and regulation, and tools are also discussed.