User selection criteria of airspace designs in Flexible Airspace Management

Flexible Airspace Management (FAM) concept offers to dynamically modify the center/sector boundaries in such way that the airspace structure is reconfigured to better distribute unbalanced traffic demands across sectors. A set of airspace design algorithms were used in the human-in-the-loop simulation to assess possible benefits of the FAM concept. In the simulation, participants were instructed to pick an algorithm-generated airspace configuration from a set of configuration options that best solved the weather-induced traffic imbalance problems in the test airspace. Participants also rated the acceptability of the airspace designs that were generated by different algorithms. This paper explores ways to objectively quantify airspace characteristics of these algorithm-generated configurations using a set of benefits and airspace quality metrics and to compare them to the participants' acceptability ratings obtained from the simulation. Both benefits and airspace quality metrics were hypothesized to correlate with the participants' ratings. The results showed that participants' selection correlated mainly with the benefits metrics, while airspace quality metrics did not play a big role.