Air traffic complexity: An input-output approach

This paper addresses a new method for describing the air traffic complexity of a given traffic situation. Air traffic complexity is defined as "how difficult" a given traffic situation is, in terms of the control activity required to resolve it, in response to an additional aircraft entering the airspace. For this, we describe an input-output framework, and present a "complexity map" that clearly provides the effective complexity for a given traffic situation. This complexity map can address airspace with an arbitrary number of aircraft. We also discuss how to extract a scalar measure of air traffic complexity from the complexity map. We illustrate our methodology with a few examples relevant to dynamic airspace management.