U-Space Utilisation of Airspace under Various Layer Function Assignments and Allocations

The interest in urban air mobility as a potential solution for urban congestion is steadily growing. Air operations in urban areas can present added complexity as compared with traditional air traffic management. As a result, it is necessary to test and develop novel airspace designs and rules. As airspace in urban areas is a scarce resource,...

Investigation of Merge Assist Policies to Improve Safety of Drone Traffic in a Constrained Urban Airspace

Package delivery via autonomous drones is often presumed to hold commercial and societal value when applied to urban environments. However, to realise the benefits, the challenge of safely managing high traffic densities of drones in heavily constrained urban spaces needs to be addressed. This paper applies the principles of traffic segmentation...

Using Reinforcement Learning to Improve Airspace Structuring in an Urban Environment

Current predictions on future drone operations estimate that traffic density orders of magnitude will be higher than any observed in manned aviation. Such densities redirect the focus towards elements that can decrease conflict rate and severity, with special emphasis on airspace structures, an element that has been overlooked within...

Safety Optimization of a Layered Airspace Structure with Supervised Learning

The capacity of the current system of air traffic is rapidly reaching a limit with the increasing demand for air transportation. Expected future traffic densities not only make automated conflict detection and resolution a necessity, but also force a re-evaluation of coordination elements to decrease conflict rate and severity. It has been...

Constrained Urban Airspace Design for Large-Scale Drone-Based Delivery Traffic

Large-scale adoption of drone-based delivery in urban areas promise societal benefits with respect to emissions and on-ground traffic congestion, as well as potential cost savings for drone-based logistic companies. However, for this to materialise, the ability of accommodating high volumes of drone traffic in an urban airspace is one of the...

Three-dimensional conflict count models for unstructured and layered airspace designs

This paper presents analytical models that describe the safety of unstructured and layered en route airspace designs. Here, ‘unstructured airspace’ refers to airspace designs that offer operators complete freedom in path planning, whereas ‘layered airspace’ refers to airspace concepts that utilize heading-altitude rules to vertically separate...

Ecological Interface Design for Vehicle Locomotion Control

Ecological interface design (EID) was originally developed in the context of process control but has been extended into many domains where technology has resulted in both changing work demands and increased opportunities for improved interface applications. This paper gives an overview of the application of the EID to the control of vehicle...

The Influence of Traffic Structure on Airspace Capacity

Airspace structure can be used as a procedural mechanism for a priori separation and organization of en-route air traffic. Although many studies have explored novel structuring methods to increase en-route airspace capacity, the relationship between the level of structuring of traffic and airspace capacity is not well established. To better...

Metropolis: Relating airspace structure and capacity for extreme traffic densities

Personal and unmanned aerial vehicles have received increasing media attention over the last decade. As a result of the growing excitement for these two aircraft types, many within and outside the aerospace industry envision a future in which large numbers of small aircraft fly over urban areas. With this vision for the future, the question...

Airborne Conflict Resolution in Three Dimensions

The advent of automation in the cockpit has greatly affected the nature of the tasks on the flight deck, as well as requirements on the flight crew. Although the introduction of automation in aircraft undeniably improved performance and safety, it also increased complexity in the cockpit. In addition to knowledge of basic flight information,...

Design of a Co-Planar Airborne Separation Display

This paper describes a concept for a coplanar airborne self-separation display, which is designed to aid pilots in their separation task, by visualizing the possibilities for conflict resolution that the airspace provides. This study is a part of an ongoing research toward the design of a constraint-based 3-D separation assistance interface that...

Experimental Evaluation of a Coplanar Airborne Separation Display

Two experiments, an active conflict resolution task and a passive situation awareness assessment, were conducted that compared two versions of a constraint-based coplanar airborne separation assistance display. A baseline display showed a maneuver space based on 2-D projections of traffic and performance constraints. A second augmented display...

Design of an Airborne Three-Dimensional Separation Assistance Display

In the context of the Next Generation Air Transportation System and Single European Sky ATM Research future airspace programs, this paper describes a concept for an airborne separation assurance display that is designed to aid pilots in their task of self-separation, by visualizing the possibilities for conflict resolution that the airspace...