Designing the Highways in the Sky for Air Taxi Operations

What is it about?

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is a new mode of intracity transportation that promises to free commuters of ground congestion by providing air-taxi services within dense metropolitan environments. Near-term UAM missions are anticipated to operate within structured airspace corridors, leading to the interesting question of how to design the corridor structure. In this paper, we describe a network flow optimization framework that provides energy-optimal corridors for a given set of origin-destination pairs, subject to airspace metrics such as airspace density, complexity, and flexibility. The framework is applied to both small-scale scenarios that demonstrate the behavior of the framework, and a full-scale scenario representative of the Atlanta metropolitan area.

Featured Image

Photo by Joey Kyber on Unsplash

Photo by Joey Kyber on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The introduction of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) operations into the airspace brings challenges related to the efficient and equitable management of UAM air traffic, particularly with regards to trajectory assignment and optimization. This work presents a method for allocating airspace to UAM traffic using a network flow optimization method that minimizes vehicle energy requirements and adheres to airspace constraints such as airspace density and complexity. The presented optimization framework and the developed formulations for airspace metrics in the context of network flow optimization contribute to understanding how to effectively integrate UAM operations into the airspace.