Traffic flow modeling and feedback control for future Low-Altitude Air city Transport: An MFD-based approach

Abstract

The imminent penetration of low-altitude passenger and delivery aircraft into the urban airspace will give rise to new urban air transport systems, which we call low-altitude air city transport (LAAT) systems. As the urban mobility revolution approaches, we must investigate (i) the collective behavior of LAAT aircraft in cities, and (ii) ways of controlling LAAT systems. Future LAAT systems exemplify a new class of modern large scale engineering systems — networked control systems. They are spatially distributed, consist of many interconnected elements with control loops through digital communication networks such that the system signals can be exchanged among all components through a common network. Therefore, a decentralized controller design in framework of the unilateral event-driven paradigm is considered. Inspired by controlled urban road networks, in this paper we first establish the concept of Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD) for LAAT systems and develop a collective and aggregate aircraft traffic flow model. Then, based on that, we design an adaptive boundary feedback flow control which is robust to various anomalies in technical devices and network communication links for LAAT systems.