A Trajectory Evaluation Platform for Urban Air Mobility (UAM)

Abstract

Nowadays, there is an increase in the demand for optimized services in urban environments. However, ground transportation in big urban centers has been facing challenges for many years (e.g., resilience and congestion) and new paradigms have been proposed, such as the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) concept. UAM aims to enhance the urban transportation system using manned and unmanned aerial vehicles (i.e., Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing - eVTOL - vehicles). Although UAM offers many benefits (e.g., cost reduction and increase in transportation capacity), many challenges need to be faced to enable safe and efficient operations. Furthermore, trajectory planning is challenging in the National Airspace System (NAS) and UAM operations due to several factors. Finally, new initiatives concerning UAM trajectory planning can be accelerated with the support of an automatic what-if platform capable of evaluating trajectories feasibility and efficiency. This research aims to propose a simulation platform for enabling trajectory evaluation in UAM operations. This platform, named Trajectory-Based Urban Air Mobility Simulator (TUS), focuses on simulating trajectories in the urban aerial environment. TUS enables users to test new UAM algorithms (e.g., flow management strategies, real-time evaluation of maneuvers effectiveness, airspace configurations) and simulate both manned and unmanned vehicles. Furthermore, TUS operation relies on a set of inputs and evaluates the trajectories generated from efficiency and safety perspectives. This process is performed using a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) approach. The experiments performed showed that TUS can perform a realistic evaluation of UAM trajectories and can be effortlessly used to simulate hundreds of scenarios.