China’s corridors-in-the-sky design and space-time congestion identification and the influence of air routes’ traffic flow

• Published in: Journal of geographical sciences 2019-12, Vol.29 (12), p.1999-2014
• Main Authors: Dong, Yaqing, Lu, Zi, Liu, Yuan, Zhang, Qiuluan, Wu, Dianshuang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Air transportation; Aircraft; Earth and Environmental Science; Geographical Information Systems/Cartography; Geography; Nature Conservation; Physical Geography; Remote Sensing/Photogrammetry; Traffic flow
• ISSN: 1009-637X; 1861-9568
• DOI: 10.1007/s11442-019-1701-3

With rapid development of air transportation, the airspace structure of the future will need to be flexible and dynamic to accommodate the increase in traffic demand. The corridors-in-the-sky has become a new technology to support the full exploitation and utilization of airspace resources. This paper proposes a method of designing corridor, identifying congestion state, and analyzing the influence of air routes’ traffic flow. From this, we have reached a number of conclusions. (1) The congestion periods present the multi-peak “wavy” scattered distributions and the peaks back-end agglomeration characteristics in the whole day. (2) The congestion segments present the structural characteristics of unbalanced coverage and concentrated distribution to the crossing points. The corridors with high congestion level present as an italic “N-shaped” frame, which presents incomplete penetration of short segments. (3) For the temporal and spatial interaction, there are two types of congestion segments, and there are some common congestion periods in different congestion segments of multiple corridors. The high-density air route plays a relatively decisive role in corridor congestion, and the influence of two directions is unbalanced. This research can provide a basis for the dynamic evaluation of China’s airspace resources and corridors construction in the future.