Predeparture Flight Planning to Minimize Operating Cost for Urban Air Mobility

Abstract

Urban air mobility (UAM) is envisioned to move to highly automated and high-density operations in low-altitude urban airspace in the future. Providers of services for UAM (PSU), rather than the legacy air traffic control, are anticipated to support operators with operational planning, aircraft deconfliction, conformance monitoring, and emergency information dissemination. Such services, for hundreds to thousands of simultaneous UAM operations in constrained airspace, can only be realized with automated systems. In this study, airspace and deconfliction models for generating predeparture conflict-free four-dimensional (4-D) flight trajectories are proposed, which can be further developed into an automated flight planning tool for PSU. A semistructured scalable airspace design for future UAM is proposed (i.e., a layered airspace topology with direct routes between vertiports, avoiding physical obstacles, such as buildings, obstructions, and restricted airspace) using the visibility graph method. Based on the proposed airspace design, deconfliction strategies (e.g., flight-level assignment and departure delay) are applied to obtain predeparture conflict-free 4-D trajectories of UAM operations by solving a mixed-integer programming problem, with the objective function to minimize the operating cost of UAM operations. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis is performed to investigate the impacts of three key cost parameters (electricity price, crew hourly rate, and maintenance hourly rate). The relationships of departure delay bound (maximum departure delay allowed) vs operating cost saving and departure delay bound vs delay cost to passengers are examined, as is the tradeoff between operating cost saving and passenger delay cost.