Strategic and Pretactical Trajectory Generation and Traffic Deconfliction for UAM: Application to Unstructured and Partially Structured Airspace

This paper develops an adaptive strategic and pre-tactical path planning and traffic deconfliction service for urban air mobility which can cope with different levels of airspace structure. The developed solution can operate in both unstructured and partially structured environments (i.e., considering geovectoring constraints). Path planning service is composed of two steps, i.e., strategic and pre-tactical. The strategic solution is powered by a multi-objective multi-constrained path optimization framework. Conversely pretactical deconfliction, aimed at modifying the strategic trajectory to accommodate it within the traffic, has been built to comply with the reasonable time to act concept included in the U-space concepts of operation. The developed solution has been tested in simulation using a relevant scenario taken from realworld. Two geovectoring volume distributions have been designed for the considered scenario driven by either scenario morphology or traffic request. For each of them several geovectoring volumes have been identified. Each of them is associated with a specific course angle that vehicles entering it has to fulfill. To accommodate vehicles flying either parallel or in the opposite direction of this course angle, each volume has been divided into two equal sub-volumes which can be defined by either performing horizontal or vertical splitting. Results aim at assessing planner performance in dealing with structured and unstructured scenarios. They demonstrate that horizontal separation of volumes increases the vehicle number within geovectoring volumes. Traffic driven geovectoring volume distribution returns more free space which can be potentially used to increased traffic density. Unstructured scenario returns less conflicts and path to be edited in pre-tactical deconfliction.