Research on airspace sector optimization based on Voronoi diagram and improved K-means algorithm

Sector partition is an important task of air traffic control, and a reasonable sector partition can improve the utilization rate of airspace and protect the flight safety of aircrafts. Since the sector partition during flat hours is not well suited to the complex air situation, this paper proposes a sector optimization method based on Voronoi diagram and improved K-means. Firstly, a conflict network is constructed based on the air situation, and a comprehensive sector control workload measurement method is proposed by combining aircraft velocity obstacle relationship and complex network theory. Based on the workload value, a cluster center is determined as the generating element of Voronoi diagram by using the improved K-means method, and then the sector is optimized by using the division method of Voronoi diagram. In this paper, the data of Xiamen airspace control sectors are collected as a simulation scenario for calculation and analysis. The simulation results show that the average variance of the optimized sector control workload is reduced by 66.04% during the peak hours and 13.88% during the flat hours compared with the original sector. The method achieves the purpose of balancing the sector workload, verifies the effectiveness of the sector optimization method, and provides a reference basis for the existing sector partition work.