Rostering of air traffic controllers – current practices in Europe, key performance trade-offs and future opportunities

The process of staff planning and rostering is one of the key factors affecting the performance of an Air Navigation Service Provider in terms of capacity and cost-efficiency delivered to airspace users. This paper gives a summary of previous works and current rostering practices applied at Area Control Centres (ACCs) in Europe. Furthermore, it identifies key trade-offs between rostering flexibility, capacity and productivity by establishing a relationship between ACC demand, rostering flexibility in place and the number of Air Traffic Control Officers (ATCOs) needed, as well as by exploring how varying rostering practices applied in ACCs affect spare capacity in the system. To that end, an initial mathematical model for optimizing ATCO staffing requirements has been proposed and tested on a case study involving three representative ACCs, reflecting different hourly variability in demand. The results suggest that - for different combinations of shift patterns and capacity profiles - substantial variation exists in both the minimum number of ATCOs and the associated spare ACC capacity. It has also been shown that a certain amount of spare capacity is inevitably present in the system due to inability to perfectly match ATCO hours with demand. Different options and enablers for exploiting such capacity are also discussed in the paper.