Lateral and Vertical Air Traffic Control Under Uncertainty Using Reinforcement Learning

Air traffic demand has increased at an unprecedented rate in the last decade (albeit interrupted by the COVID pandemic), but capacity has not increased at the same rate. Higher levels of automation and the implementation of decision-support tools for air traffic controllers could help increase capacity and catch up with demand. The air traffic...

Metropolis II: Benefits of Centralised Separation Management in High-Density Urban Airspace

The Metropolis II project aimed to study the impact of centralised separation management for urban aerial mobility. Three concepts were developed in this study: a fully centralised, strategically separated concept, a hybrid concept featuring cen- tralised strategic separation and distributed tactical separation, and a fully distributed tactical...

A Tactical Conflict Resolution Method for UAVs in Geovectored Airspace

In order to enable the safe and efficient integration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles into very low level airspace, current day research focuses on the development of new traffic services and procedures. One of these is the geovectoring protocol, which aims to reduce traffic complexity by setting limits on the allowed ground speed, course, and...

Conflict Prevention, Detection, and Resolution in Constrained Very Low-Level Urban Airspace

The interest for using small aircraft for missions in urban airspace is growing for applications like parcel deliveries. Research shows that conventional airspace structure and conflict detection and resolution techniques are not suitable for main- taining a high level of safety in constrained urban environments, especially when aircraft are...

Metropolis II: Investigating the Future Shape of Air Traffic Control in Highly Dense Urban Airspace

Metropolis II aims to provide insights in what is needed to enable high-density urban air operations. It does this by investigating the foundation for U-space U3/U4 services. The final goal is to provide a unified approach for strategic deconfliction, tactical deconfliction, and dynamic capacity management. Highly-dense operations in...

Limitations of Conflict Prevention and Resolution in Constrained Very Low-Level Urban Airspace

Road traffic delay and urban overcrowding are increasing rapidly all over the world. As a result, several companies have proposed the use of small unmanned aerial vehicles (sUAVs) as an alternative to road-based transportation. These small autonomous drones are expected to operate within a thin airspace band (Very Low Level) in high traffic...