3D airspace sectoring by evolutionary computation : real-world applications

Abstract : This paper presents a new method for 3D cutting of geometrical space with application to airspace sectoring. This problem comes from the air traffic management but the proposed method may be applied to many other areas. This problem consists in finding a cutting of a 3D volume into sectors in order to balance the weights of sectors and which minimizes the flow cut on sector boundaries. A mathematical modeling of this problem has been proposed for which state space,objective functions and constraints are defined. The complexity of such problem being NP Hard,stochastic optimization have been used to address it. An Evolutionary Algorithm has been implemented for which chromosome coding and operators have been developed. Realistic problem instances have been tested on this algorithm for which the solutions produced fulfill our objective.