Introducing digital air-traffic controllers for urban-air mobility to ensure safe and energy-efficient flight operations

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Abstract Facing the continued growth of cities, the introduction of urban-air mobility intends to reduce traffic congestion and improve the quality of services such as on-demand-transport, reduced travel times and increased connectivity. Nevertheless, its integration into existing air-traffic flows remains one of the biggest challenges ahead, especially once controlled airspace overlaps with urban-air mobility areas, such as at airport control zones. Here, air-traffic control needs to coordinate amobng urban-air mobility vehicles and conventional air traffic. In 2022, DLR conducted a human-in-the-loop simulation with ten air-traffic controllers to validate previously developed workflows for that coordination task applied for Hamburg airport. The simulation results revealed that additional urban-air mobility traffic increases controllers’ experienced workload up to 30% while slightly reducing their perceived situation awareness. Thus, a majority of controllers participating in the trials suggested to introduce an additional controller working position to exclusively control airtaxis and traffic following visual flight rules. This option is assessed as owning a high potential as cost intensive adaptions of regulations and procedures can be omitted. Nevertheless, the feasibility of this option is rather low due to the limited availability of endorsed human controllers. This study proposes a concept for a digital controller taking the responsibility of guidance for airtaxis under visual flight rules traffic (abbr. VFR) within a control zone. This digital controller is named “UAM digital controller” (abbr. UDC) and based on algorithms calculating slots and trajectories which have been validated in previous DLR projects. The UDC coordinates with the human controller once a potential conflict is detected. Within the study, first the concept of the digital controller is defined, following existing work. As a second step, a theoretical evaluation based on an air-traffic control task model and an operational concept for airtaxi integration will analyze the task load reduction for the human controller. Last but not least, the expected energy saving of flight operations by the digital controllers will be assessed.