Real-time Traffic Simulation and Management for Large-scale Urban Air Mobility: Integrating Route Guidance and Collision Avoidance

Abstract: Given the spatial heterogeneity of land use patterns in most cities, large-scale UAM will likely be deployed in specific areas, e.g., inter-transfer traffic between suburbs and city centers. However, large-scale UAM operations connecting multiple origin-destination pairs raise concerns about air traffic safety and efficiency with respect to conflict movements, particularly at large conflict points similar to roadway junctions. In this work, we propose an operational framework that integrates route guidance and collision avoidance to achieve an elegant trade-off between air traffic safety and efficiency. The route guidance mechanism aims to optimize aircraft distribution across both spatial and temporal dimensions by regulating their paths (composed of waypoints). Given the optimized paths, the collision avoidance module aims to generate collision-free aircraft trajectories between waypoints in 3D space. To enable large-scale operations, we develop a fast approximation method to solve the optimal path planning problem and employ the velocity obstacle model for collision avoidance. The proposed route guidance strategy significantly reduces the computational requirements for collision avoidance. As far as we know, this work is one of the first to combine route guidance and collision avoidance for UAM. The results indicate that the framework can enable efficient and flexible UAM operations, such as air traffic assignment, congestion prevention, and dynamic airspace clearance. Compared to the management scheme based on air corridors, the proposed framework has considerable improvements in computational efficiency (433%), average travel speed (70.2%), and trip completion rate (130%). The proposed framework has demonstrated great potential for real-time traffic simulation and management in large-scale UAM systems.