Integrating weather impact in air traffic controller shift scheduling in remote and conventional towers

Weather affects the work of air traffic controllers, however, for staff scheduling in Remote Tower Centers (RTCs) it has not been taken into account. We study the impact of various weather phenomena on air traffic controller (ATCO) taskload through structured interviews with ATCOs. We deduce taskload-driven impact factors and the corresponding thresholds for the intensity of the weather phenomena at several Swedish airports. To account for the uncertainty in the weather prediction, we obtain probabilistic weather data from Ensemble Prediction Systems (EPSs). Then we adjust our prior Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) model for RTC staff scheduling to account for uncertain impactful weather occurrences and yield a distribution for the necessary number of ATCOs for RTC staff scheduling. Our framework can be used for conventional towers as well.

We quantify the impact of weather by comparing the number of controllers necessary to operate at five Swedish airports from a remote tower during two example days in 2020, with and without taking weather events into account. In our calculations we use historical weather and flight data to show that ignoring weather impact may lead to significant understaffing at a RTC.