A Novel Method for STAM Selection Promises Significant Air Traffic Complexity Reduction in Convective Weather Conditions

Current methods to reduce air traffic complexity during convective weather conditions are sometimes not sufficient to meet the traffic demand in such situations. The most common strategy deployed by flow management personnel for complexity reduction during convective weather is to apply a limit to the number of aircraft entering the affected or surrounding airspace. Such complexity reduction measures globally affect the airspace capacity and can be inefficient. A better outcome in complexity reduction would be a complexity reduction measure that either restructures the airspace to rebalance complexity or a measure that cherry-picks flights with the highest impact on complexity. This paper proposes a method for complexity reduction in convective weather, which applies short-term air traffic flow management measures (STAMs) such as airspace restructuring and individual aircraft trajectory changes. Complexity reduction measures are applied to the most complex sector, thus reducing the global effect of a measure. The results of this paper showed that STAMs can reduce air traffic complexity by up to 19.63%. The benefit gained from STAMs comes with diminishing returns when more than four STAMs are applied to the most complex sector. When comparing traffic scenarios without convective weather to those with convective weather, it was shown that convective weather has a variable impact on air traffic complexity, ranging from 91% to 184% of the nominal complexity value.