Conflict-Free Flight Scheduling Using Strategic Demand Capacity Balancing for Urban Air Mobility Operations

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable, conflict-free flight scheduling method for Urban Air Mobility that reduces delays by optimizing departure times while maintaining safety in congested airspace.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-agent scheduling approach based on Pairwise Conflict Avoidance and optimization, ensuring safe, efficient UAM operations under increasing traffic densities.

Findings

Significant delay reduction in simulations

Effective conflict avoidance in multi-agent scenarios

Scalable framework for urban air mobility

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a conflict-free multi- agent flight scheduling that ensures robust separation in con- strained airspace for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) operations application. First, we introduce Pairwise Conflict Avoidance (PCA) based on delayed departures, leveraging kinematic principles to maintain safe distances. Next, we expand PCA to multi-agent scenarios, formulating an optimization approach that systematically determines departure times under increasing traffic densities. Performance metrics, such as average delay, assess the effectiveness of our solution. Through numerical simulations across diverse multi-agent environments and real- world UAM use cases, our method demonstrates a significant reduction in total delay while ensuring collision-free operations. This approach provides a scalable framework for emerging urban air mobility systems.