Improvements of tube design for trunk routes in China

Tube airspace design has been recognized as a promising method to increase airspace capability and reduce flight delay and air traffic controller workload in national airspace system. In this paper, a new tube design methodology with two key improvements is presented to build tube airspace in China. Flight trajectories´ clustering is weighted by flight flow, and position and category using the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process). And MAKLINK graph and Genetic Algorithm is adopted to find conflict free tube center lines to avoid the special use airspace. Experiments on tube design of trunk routes in China show the efficacy of the proposed methodology.