Graduation Year

2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Major Professor

Yu Zhang, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Fred Mannering, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Robert Bertini, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Hadi Charkhgard, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Dengfeng Sun, Ph.D.

Committee Member

He Zhang, Ph.D.

Keywords

Flight Planning, Strategic Deconfliction, Airspace Structure, 4D Trajectory, Operating Cost

Abstract

Urban Air Mobility (UAM), a part of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), focused on transporting passengers in low-altitude urban airspace, has attracted extensive attention among industry, government, academia, and the public. Compared to existing commercial flights, to be able to succeed, 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. This dissertation is focused on developing airspace structure and flight deconfliction methods to support conflict-free 4D trajectories flight planning for UAM operations of medium to high-density traffic, which can be further developed into an automated flight planning tool for PSU.We propose a semi-structured airspace design for future UAM, i.e., a layered airspace topology with direct routes between enroute entry and exit points, avoiding physical obstacles such as buildings, obstructions, and restricted airspace. The proposed airspace structure has the ability to scale to future high-density operations. Based on the proposed airspace design, deconfliction strategies, e.g., flight level assignment, departure delay, and speed control are applied to strategically resolve conflicts in UAM operations. Multiple strategic deconfliction models are developed with different objectives and purposes, including system cost, fairness among operators, operating cost, and the number of conflicts. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the strategic deconfliction approaches developed on our proposed airspace structure for medium- to high-density UAM operations. Valuable insights for PSU, operators, and different stakeholders are obtained from extensive analyses.

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