Accommodating Operational Uncertainty in Urban Air Mobility Operations with Strategic Deconfliction

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-2333.vid Strategic deconfliction is a key mechanism for achieving separation between Urban Air Mobility (UAM) operations. However, operational uncertainties may degrade its effectiveness. In this paper, we quantify the effectiveness of strategic deconfliction in mitigating scheduled and unscheduled flight delays under operational uncertainty in the form of normally distributed departure and airborne errors. A range of demand levels representing early-stage UAM operations were simulated across a conceptual network of 3 vertiports in the San Francisco Bay Area. Three approaches to strategic deconfliction were simulated which varied the requirement for rescheduling into the existing schedule when an operation incurred departure or airborne error – a tight conformance requirement tied to the minimum spacing requirement; a relaxed conformance requirement comparable to that used for internal departure scheduling in Time-Based Flow Management; and no conformance requirement in which operations were never rescheduled into the existing scheduled – only replanned tactically. Results from these simulations were compared to a baseline that simulated tactical deconfliction without strategic deconfliction. Results suggest that, even at moderate demand levels and departure and airborne error variability, departure and airborne delays under strategic deconfliction are highly sensitive to how much rescheduling is required into the existing schedule. Results applying strategic deconfliction with no conformance requirement, with departure and airborne error being accommodated tactically, showed significantly improved performance – even at relatively high demand and error variability. Future work should explore the safety and gaming implications of strategic deconfliction with such relaxed conformance requirements and compare its performance to using demand capacity balancing instead of strategic deconfliction.