Modeling and analysis of terminal airspace capacity in air traffic control

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Under the continuous growth of air transportation, lack of airport capacity is serious especially in megalopolis areas. Airport expansion and developing new airports are effective to reduce the congestion. However the resultant situation from these countermeasures will carry a new congestion problem, because the aircraft landing and take off to/from the airports must fly through the limited airspace over the dense airports area.Ttaffic capacity of an airspace mainly depends on two factors : minimum separation between two aircrafts and the upper limit of controller's capability in ATC workload including maintaining the separation. The level of ATC workload varies in sector characteristics, so that the capacity of an airspace based on ATC workload should be determined as the maximum throughput corresponding with the optimal configuration of ATC sectors.This study aims to clear which kind of traffic capacity is critical in the airspace over an area with multiple congested airports. The behavior of ATC in a sector is modeled as a queuing system and the level o workload is evaluated by the hand-off delay between sectors. The numerical examination tells us that the capacity based on ATC workload is lower than the capacity based on minimum separation in much cases.