Drawing the Highways in the Sky for Urban Air Mobility Operations

Urban air mobility (UAM) is a new mode of intracity transportation that promises to free commuters of ground congestion by providing air-taxi services within dense metropolitan environments. The introduction of UAM operations into the airspace, however, brings challenges related to the efficient and equitable management of UAM air traffic, particularly with regard to trajectory assignment and optimization. Near-term UAM missions are anticipated to operate within structured airspace corridors, leading to the interesting problem of corridor formation. In this paper, we describe a minimum-cost, network flow optimization framework that provides global optimal corridors for a given set of origin-destination pairs, subject to airspace metrics such as airspace density, complexity, and flexibility. The framework is applied to both small-scale scenarios that demonstrate the behavior of the framework and a full-scale scenario representative of the Atlanta metropolitan area. This work contributes to understanding how to effectively integrate UAM into the airspace.