Using Redundancy and Risk Awareness to Improve UAM Network Design

In their study, “Risk-aware urban air mobility network design with overflow redundancy,” University of Texas at Austion professors John-Paul Clarke and Ufuk Topcu, along with their postdoctoral fellows, Qinshuang Wei, and Zhenyu Gao, have devised a plan for urban air mobility (UAM) network design that factors in reserve capacity that takes into account alternative landing options and flight corridors to improve contingency management for this nascent form of air transportation.

To do this, the researchers understood that precise air traffic management is critical – especially when physical and operational disruptions impact traffic overflows. Using networks from the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Atlanta, Georgia, and Dallas-Fort Worth metroplexes, they modeled how disruptions could impact traffic flow and, more importantly, how the effected aircraft can be rerouted via an extended network using reserve capacity.

Having multiple Plan Bs in a UAM Network

By considering the issue as an optimization problem, the team selected locations for backup vertiports and their corresponding capacities taking into account all possible disruption scenarios. The throughput there is the maximal amount of flights the network can accommodate in a given unit of time.

The study’s conclusion proposes a novel method for UAM network design, one that yields better operational outcomes during disruptions and proposes a mean to optimize deployment when resources to do so are limited. The solution is risk-aware and, using an extended network model with additional reserve capacity, improves the efficiency and safety of this new, on-demand air transportation service.

#AAM Today #AAM #UAM #vertiports