Flexible or dynamic airspace in the terminal airspace of a metroplex offers substantial potential for benefit within both near-term and longer-term concepts of operation. Current static procedures to decouple operations at large metroplex airports result in dividing airspace resources in a way that is robust to the variations in traffic at each airport. By adjusting how segments of airspace are allocated to different airports as the traffic at each airport varies in time, capacity can be shifted to better match demand and the busiest flows may be given more efficient routes. This paper presents a Dynamic Metroplex Airspace algorithm for computing a sequence of airspace designs that optimize traffic at a metroplex. Airspace designs produced by the DMA algorithm are first qualitatively compared with the current baseline for the New York metroplex. The DMA algorithm was implemented within a simulation environment and traffic was simulated using both static baseline and dynamic airspace designs.
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