The future air travel demand will keep increasing at a steady rate, and the future flights and trajectory-based operations will become more flexible. Due to lack of flexibility, the current National Airspace System (NAS) does not have the ability to efficiently cope with the increasing air travel demand or to implement flexible use of future airspace. A lot of work has been done in the framework of Dynamic Airspace Configuration (DAC), aiming at dynamically configuring airspace to better accommodate the fluctuating air traffic demand and changing traffic pattern, but most past research has been focused on en route airspace. In this paper, a sector design algorithm is proposed for DAC in the terminal airspace, which combines a constrainted κ-means clustering algorithm, integer programming techniques, and an alpha shapes based sectorization algorithm to improve the efficiency of airspace utilization and reduce the traffic complexity. Historical traffic data from major U.S. airports such as Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) and Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) and simulated traffic data with future route designs and traffic patterns are used to validate the proposed algorithm and evaluate its performance.
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