Air Traffic Management with Hierarchical Hexagonal Geospatial Index

Nowadays global spatial indexes provide reach features for geographic data analysis. A variety of standards of spatial indexes with global coverage provide computational cheap processing and visualization of data associated with latitude and longitude. In the paper we consider potential benefits of Hierarchical Hexagonal Spatial Index (H3) implementation to support air traffic management (ATM). H3 could be useful in automatic data processing algorithms for representation of airspace, particular zones, and sectors of airspace with different shape complexity. Hierarchical hexagonal cell provides different levels of precision which could be associated with an area of uncertainty in positioning system used on board airplanes. Airspace users could be associated with a particular cell of geospatial index. H3 could be a complete environment to support ATM on the basis of aviation safety, which is required for the wide implementation of free route airspace globally. An airplane trajectory obtained by Automatic dependent Surveillance-broadcast technique has been classified to use different parts of airspace during departure from UKBB International airport based on a hexagonal representation of airspace user and airspace elements.