Decentralized Air Traffic Management for Advanced Air Mobility

TL;DR

This paper explores a decentralized, airborne cooperative traffic management method for Advanced Air Mobility that could improve safety and efficiency without relying solely on traditional corridor-based or ground-centered systems.

Contribution

It introduces and evaluates a scalable simulation model of a cooperative airborne traffic coordination method as an alternative to existing corridor and ground-based systems.

Findings

The cooperative method can safely resolve conflicts among multiple aircraft.

It achieves higher efficiency compared to Detect-And-Avoid (DAA) alone.

Potential to serve as a fallback or complement to ground-based traffic management.

Abstract

Leading proposals for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) recognize the need for strategic and tactical airspace deconfliction, where the need for coordination appears in different forms and nuances. One recurring element is the use of pre-defined airways or corridors, a natural way to create order, with proven success from the conventional, manned, Air Traffic Management (ATM). But, while ATM is evolving to 4D Trajectory-Based Operations, when we apply the ATM principles to very dense and potentially more complex operations such as AAM, we have to consider their limitations in such demanding new environment. The requirement of following circulation corridors most often increase flight distance and inevitably create bottlenecks, hence we explore the hypothesis of not using corridors, testing such option via a simple and scalable simulation model. Other motivations for comparing different forms of traffic coordination are redundancy and diversity, which have potential to increase system safety. Relying on a single method to maintain traffic separation of course would not be allowed in practice. However, the concepts that we have seen so far leave a gap between two very distinct and co-existing methods: one, cooperative and centered on a ground-based Provider of Services for UAM (PSU), and another, which is mostly non-cooperative and independent, centered on the individual aircraft, commonly referred to as Detect-And-Avoid (DAA). This duality achieves a welcomed diversity, however presents several points for improvement. In-between these opposite methods, this paper analyzes the performance of an airborne cooperative method to coordinate traffic which is capable of safely solving conflicts of multiple aircraft (more than two) and achieve higher efficiency than DAA alone, thus with potential for being an alternative or a live fallback for ground-based traffic coordination.