Drawing the Highways in the Sky for Urban Air Mobility Operations

What is it about?

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is a new mode of intracity transportation that promises to free commuters of ground congestion by providing air-taxi services within dense metropolitan environments. Near-term UAM missions are anticipated to operate within structured airspace corridors, leading to the interesting question of how to design the corridor structure. In this paper, we describe a network flow optimization framework that provides energy-optimal corridors for a given set of origin-destination pairs, subject to airspace metrics such as airspace density, complexity, and flexibility. The framework is applied to both small-scale scenarios that demonstrate the behavior of the framework, and a full-scale scenario representative of the Atlanta metropolitan area.

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