| The volume of air traffic in the National Air Space has been growing at a very fast pace during recent years, and increasing demand for air travel in coming years is predicted. Strategic Planning is a necessary tool to guarantee a safe and efficient increase of Air Traffic. An Aggregate Model for Strategic Planning of Air Traffic Management is the framework of this project.;Aggregate models require the creation of a network that is representative of the expected flow and which will serve as a platform to solve flow optimization problems. We have integrated an automatic method for route clustering -- Smax method -- to generate the required network. Automatic clustering is necessary in order to efficiently cluster many individual scenarios.;Some available alternatives to determine the number of clusters are tested. The studied alternatives provide success rates that oscillates between 49% and 68%. In addition to the relatively low success rates, these methods require one user-input parameter, and they are highly sensitive to it.;A different method, based on the Silhouette Score and the Dip Test measures, is developed. The Smax method requires no user-input parameters, and it consistently provides rates of success that approximately oscillate between the 72% and the 81%.;The presented clustering approach noticeably improves the rate of correct clustering cases for the specific scenario of route clustering. |
