Research The Air Traffic Management Operation Mechanism And Performance Assessment Based On The Flexible Use Of Airspace

During the last two decades, China’s air transportation industry has experienced an explosive development, and the demand of it has kept increasing with a strong momentum. With the air traffic flow growing, the available airspace is getting close to the maximum capacity. Under this circumstance, air transportation system always has to endure large scale flight delay when meeting adverse weather condition, which presents challenges to the current airspace management and operation mechanism of China. In that case, a more practical airspace management and operation mechanism is one of the most essential ways to effectively promise the further development of air transportation industry in China. Meanwhile, evaluating the performance of airspace management and operation mechanism and adjusting operation procedure and regulations are other crucial parts of the solutions to the issue of airspace shortage.With the objective of solving the issues of current airspace management and operation in China, this paper explores the airspace management mechanism and air traffic management operation procedure in western countries, and analyzes the benefits of implementing the concept of flexible use of airspace; meanwhile, based on the present national status of China, the drawbacks in airspace management, civil/military coordination and airspace structure are discussed. Consequently, the necessity and feasibility of the flexible use of airspace and a possible air traffic management mechanism based on the flexible use of airspace are explored.Furthermore, this paper reviews methodologies to evaluate system performance and concludes the characteristics of methodologies applied in different fields. After that, a concept of integrated use of different methodologies is proposed and verified with example. Based on the performance index, the analytic hierarchy process and expert scoring method are adopted; however, considering the inferior of the analytic hierarchy process, a modified analytic hierarchy process is proposed. In the evaluation process, expert scoring method is used to assign weight to index, and the modified analytic hierarchy process is used to assess the overall performance of the target. Based on this theory, a performance evaluation model is built for the proposed air traffic management operation mechanism with flexible use of airspace. Also, working with relevant experts, that performance evaluation model is verified with. The result shows that the proposed air traffic management operation mechanism is reasonable and performs good.