Traffic Volume Intersection Metric for Metroplex Clustering Analysis

With the ever increasing growth of airborne traffic, many individual airports can no longer be viewed as individual entities, but rather as members of a larger, interdependent group. We call such a group of airports a metroplex. While we can qualitatively cluster nearby airports into metroplexes, creating a numerical metric is desirable for understanding the growth of each metroplex, determining when an airport enters a nearby metroplex, and studying the creation of new metroplexes as traffic increases. In this paper we will attempt to define several factors in our search for an interaction metric. While we believe that the derived metric is directly related to the notion of interaction between airports, the methods presented here could be used as a framework to build and test alternate metrics. The notion of our metric is that each airport has an ideal arrival space (volume) surrounding it, and if the arrival space of two neighboring airports overlap, the aircraft flying through this shared space would cause interaction. This interaction is a measure of the added complexity due to the neighboring airport. This pairwise complexity would be handled through procedure design, additional controller workload, or any other method used to reduce this complexity. The metric presented in this paper attempts to capture such interaction.