Air Traffic Assignment for Intensive Urban Air Mobility Operations

In high-density urban air mobility (UAM) operations, mitigating congestion and reducing structural constraints are key challenges. Pioneering urban airspace design projects expect the air vehicles to fit into structured UAM corridor networks. However, most existing air transport networks are not capable of handling the increasing traffic demand, which is likely to cause congestion, traffic complexity, and safety issues. To adapt the increasing demand to the current airspace capacity, a novel macroscopic traffic assignment model is proposed to mitigate the congestion and organize the structure of air traffic flow. Firstly, the UAM corridor is designed and fitted into graph representation. Then, a traffic assignment problem based on linear dynamic system is formalized to minimize the congestion factors and the intrinsic air traffic complexity. A two-step resolution method based on Dafermos's algorithm is introduced to efficiently solve this optimization problem. A case study is carried out on a two-layer air transport network with intensive UAM operations. The results demonstrate that the proposed model can successfully mitigate urban airspace congestion and organize the UAM traffic into a low-complexity flow pattern. This approach can be used as a tool to assist air navigation service provider in strategic planning for a given transportation network.