This paper presents a centralized strategic planning and deconfliction service solution which is able to return conflict free trajectories for Urban Air Mobility applications. The service, specifically tailored for dealing with the free-flight portion of the assumed airspace model is targeted for rotorcraft platforms and for off-line (pre-flight) computation. It is able to handle several types of missions and to deconflict them using the reasonable time to act concept. The latter has been introduced by Corus-XUAM to overcome the first-come first-served criteria and aims at solving deconfliction by sorting the vehicles as a function of their priority and required starting time. Two phases are envisaged by the planner in accordance with the current regulation. The first phase, referred to as strategic, is performed when the user exposes the willing of performing the mission (it can occur also long time before the mission start) and is demanded at finding an optimal trajectory accounting for all the constraints imposed by the urban environment (e.g., fixed obstacles, altitude limits, navigation challenges, risk maps), excluding traffic information. The second phase, i.e., pre-tactical, is carried out a few minutes before the mission starts and aims at deconflicting the strategic estimated trajectory with all the existing traffic. The prototype service has been tested within layered airspace model inspired by recent developments and regulatory guidelines. Two layers (i.e., low and medium) aimed at either goods or people transportation have been taken into account over the city of Naples. Different request densities have been considered. Despite the high number of the request, only a little part (2%) of the lower-level airspace is occupied by the traffic, thus suggesting a greater quantity of vehicles could be accomodated. Conversely in the medium level the airspace capacity is strictly linked to the number of vertiports and their availability.
Towards a Strategic Deconfliction Service Based on Multi-Objective Path Planning for Low Altitude Airspace
2024-09-29
1593984 byte
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English