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A Traffic Management Framework for On-Demand Urban Air Mobility Systems

Milad Pooladsanj, Ketan Savla, Petros A. Ioannou

TL;DR

This work addresses scheduling for on demand Urban Air Mobility by introducing VertiSync, a centralized, cycle based policy that jointly schedules servicing and rebalancing while enforcing safety margins and energy constraints. The method minimizes total airborne time through a cycle optimization over slot based trajectories, with a rigorous throughput analysis that yields an inner bound under symmetry for large fleets and a fundamental outer limit for safe by construction policies. The authors prove key results: an inner throughput characterization (Theorem thm:renewal-sufficient) and a necessary condition (Theorem thm:necessary) that together delimit the feasible demand region, and they validate the approach with a Los Angeles case study showing substantial improvements over FCFS and favorable comparisons to ground travel under heavy demand. The work demonstrates a practical pathway to scalable, centralized traffic management for on demand UAM and provides theoretical and empirical benchmarks for performance and feasibility.

Abstract

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) offers a solution to current traffic congestion by providing on-demand air mobility in urban areas. Effective traffic management is crucial for efficient operation of UAM systems, especially for high-demand scenarios. In this paper, we present a centralized traffic management framework for on-demand UAM systems. Specifically, we provide a scheduling policy, called VertiSync, which schedules the aircraft for either servicing trip requests or rebalancing in the system subject to aircraft safety margins and energy requirements. We characterize the system-level throughput of VertiSync, which determines the demand threshold at which passenger waiting times transition from being stabilized to being increasing over time. We show that the proposed policy is able to maximize throughput for sufficiently large fleet sizes. We demonstrate the performance of VertiSync through a case study for the city of Los Angeles, and show that it significantly reduces passenger waiting times compared to a first-come first-serve scheduling policy.

A Traffic Management Framework for On-Demand Urban Air Mobility Systems

TL;DR

This work addresses scheduling for on demand Urban Air Mobility by introducing VertiSync, a centralized, cycle based policy that jointly schedules servicing and rebalancing while enforcing safety margins and energy constraints. The method minimizes total airborne time through a cycle optimization over slot based trajectories, with a rigorous throughput analysis that yields an inner bound under symmetry for large fleets and a fundamental outer limit for safe by construction policies. The authors prove key results: an inner throughput characterization (Theorem thm:renewal-sufficient) and a necessary condition (Theorem thm:necessary) that together delimit the feasible demand region, and they validate the approach with a Los Angeles case study showing substantial improvements over FCFS and favorable comparisons to ground travel under heavy demand. The work demonstrates a practical pathway to scalable, centralized traffic management for on demand UAM and provides theoretical and empirical benchmarks for performance and feasibility.

Abstract

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) offers a solution to current traffic congestion by providing on-demand air mobility in urban areas. Effective traffic management is crucial for efficient operation of UAM systems, especially for high-demand scenarios. In this paper, we present a centralized traffic management framework for on-demand UAM systems. Specifically, we provide a scheduling policy, called VertiSync, which schedules the aircraft for either servicing trip requests or rebalancing in the system subject to aircraft safety margins and energy requirements. We characterize the system-level throughput of VertiSync, which determines the demand threshold at which passenger waiting times transition from being stabilized to being increasing over time. We show that the proposed policy is able to maximize throughput for sufficiently large fleet sizes. We demonstrate the performance of VertiSync through a case study for the city of Los Angeles, and show that it significantly reduces passenger waiting times compared to a first-come first-serve scheduling policy.
Paper Structure (13 sections, 2 theorems, 22 equations, 5 figures)

This paper contains 13 sections, 2 theorems, 22 equations, 5 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Problem Formulation
  3. UAM Network Structure
  4. Operational Constraints
  5. Demand and Performance Metric
  6. Network-Wide Scheduling
  7. VertiSync Policy
  8. VertiSync Throughput
  9. Fundamental Limit on Throughput
  10. Simulation Results
  11. Conclusion
  12. Proof of Theorem \ref{['thm:renewal-sufficient']}
  13. Proof of Theorem \ref{['thm:necessary']}

Key Result

Theorem 1

If the UAM network satisfies the symmetry Assumption assumption:symmetry, and the number of aircraft satisfies then the VertiSync policy can keep the network under-saturated for demands belonging to the set where the vector inequality $\lambda_{} < \sum_{i = 1}^{R}R_{}^{i} x_i$ is considered component-wise.

Figures (5)

  • Figure 1: A UAM network with $V_{}=4$ vertiports (blue circles) and $P=8$ O-D pairs $(1,3)$, $(1,4)$, $(2,3)$, $(2,4)$, $(3,1)$, $(4,2)$, $(1,2)$, and $(2,1)$.
  • Figure 2: The UAM network for the city of Los Angeles. The blue circles show the vertiports and the orange arrows show the links.
  • Figure 3: The rate of trip requests per $\tau$ minutes ($\lambda_{}(t)$).
  • Figure 4: The travel time under the VertiSync and FCFS policies for the demand $\lambda_{}(t)$.
  • Figure 5: The travel time under the VertiSync policy when the demand is increased to $1.2\lambda_{}(t)$ (over-saturated regime), and the ground transportation travel time.

Theorems & Definitions (9)

  • Remark 1
  • Remark 2
  • Definition 1
  • Remark 3
  • Example 1
  • Theorem 1
  • proof
  • Theorem 2
  • proof