Resolution of Potential Conflicts caused by Contingency Events in an AAM Traffic Network

Abstract

This study presents an approach for pre-flight replanning process to be used in the future Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) system especially after contingency situations and relevant activities take place. The methodology for pre-flight replanning phase is analyzed and modeled in two steps as optimization based potential conflict resolution and demand capacity balancing, which respectively provides safety for the surrounding traffic and efficiency for the traffic network in case of a contingency. These two models can work iteratively to achieve pre-flight replanning for the Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM). The developed pre-flight replanning model can also be used at strategic planning phase. For the use cases, a very large UTM traffic network is considered to have a highly dense traffic environment since the expected complexity is high with the AAM system and to show the efficiency and scalability of the models. Two use cases are examined. First one is about initial flight planning where the conflicted flight plans are safely separated and balance in demand and capacity at vertiports is provided. Second scenario is related to potential conflict resolution for the flights at pre-tactical phase after contingency events observed within the network and demand-capacity balancing after safety related events are resolved. The main objective of this work is to develop a pre-flight replanning service to work compatible with contingency management activities to build the introduced system-wide contingency management concept for the AAM system.