Automated flight planning of high-density urban air mobility

Abstract

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is an emerging concept for transporting people and cargo in urban, rural, regional, and interregional settings using revolutionary new aircraft. Urban Air Mobility (UAM), a part of AAM, focused on transport passengers in low-altitude urban airspace, has attracted extensive attention among industry, government, academia, and the public. Compared to existing commercial flights, AAM operations are expected to be at higher density; thus, an AAM system needs to be scalable, safe, and autonomous. Third-party service providers are recommended for offering air traffic management and information sharing services given the anticipated high density of UAM operations. To this end, we propose an Automated Flight Planning System (AFPS) that could be employed by such service providers. In the AFPS, a Low-Altitude Airspace Management System (LAMS) is proposed to automatically generate a route network with the capability of avoiding obstacles and obstructions in low-altitude airspace. The main components of this tool are the generation of a 3D map with LiDAR data, construction of a nodal network based on the map by using the visibility graph method, and initiation of 3D shortest paths. Given the requests of flight operations, i.e., origin, destination, departure time, the Low-Altitude Traffic Management System (LTMS) will design pre-departure conflict-free 4D trajectories and provide flexibilities of en-route maneuvering by taking system cost and equity among operators into consideration. In this study, a flight-level assignment strategy is proposed to solve the trajectory deconfliction problem in LTMS. In addition, a Nash Social Welfare Program (NSWP) is introduced to maintain fairness among different operators if the service is provided to multiple operators of UAM. A case study of the Tampa Bay area in Florida is used to demonstrate the operability of the proposed AFPS, and animations are built to visualize the optimized conflict-free operations of UAM in the study area.