Risk-aware Urban Air Mobility Network Design with Overflow Redundancy

arXiv2306.05581MaRDI QIDQ6439720FDOQ6439720

Authors: Qinshuang Wei, Zhenyu Gao, John-Paul Clarke, Ufuk Topcu 

Publication date: 8 June 2023

Abstract: Urban Air Mobility (UAM), as envisioned by researchers and practitioners, will be achieved through the use of highly automated aircraft that operate and transport passengers and cargo at low altitudes within urban and suburban areas. To operate in complex urban environment, precise air traffic management, in particular the management of traffic overflows due to operational disruptions will be critical to ensuring system safety and efficiency. To this end, we propose a methodology for the design of UAM networks with reserve capacity, i.e., a design where alternative landing options and flight corridors are explicitly considered as a means of improving contingency management and reducing risk. Similar redundancy considerations are incorporated in the design of many critical infrastructures, yet remain unexploited in the air transportation literature. In our methodology, we first model how disruptions to a given on-demand UAM network might impact on the nominal traffic flow and how this flow might be re-accommodated on an extended network with reserve capacity. Then, through an optimization problem, we select the locations and capacities for the backup vertiports with the maximal expected throughput of the extended network over all possible disruption scenarios, while the throughput is the maximal amount of flights that the network can accommodate per unit of time. We show that we can obtain the solution for the corresponding bi-level and bi-linear optimization problem by solving a mixed-integer linear program. We demonstrate our methodology in the case study using networks from Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Dallas--Fort Worth metropolitan areas and show how the throughput and flexibility of the UAM networks with reserve capacity can outcompete those without.

Has companion code repository: https://github.com/QinshuangCoolWei/Risk-aware-Urban-Air-Mobility-Network-Design-with-Overflow-Redundancy

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