Forecasting openings control sectors

The French airspace is divided into basic space sectors that can be grouped to form control areas assigned to controller working positions. The allocation of space sectors workstations changes during the day, depending on the controllers' workload.

In operation, it is very difficult to accurately anticipate workloads on control areas for the next hour or the next day, even with a good traffic forecasting. There are at least two reasons:

• Firstly, estimate a human operators workload in a sector with a given traffic is not easy.
• Secondly, we do not know, a priori, the partitioning of the space control sectors, because this is a real time calculated partitioning depending on the workload.

The objective is to build a realistic prediction of the air sectors configuration. In the studied problem here, the traffic is not considered as an adjustment variable, but as a given input. It does not regulate the traffic demand, but simply plays on how to combine the basic sectors to build a (the best) balanced airspace partition, taking into account operational constraints (number of working positions , etc.).