Preliminary concept of adaptive urban airspace management for unmanned aircraft operations

This paper discusses the initial concept of managing the urban airspace in an adaptive manner (better known as Adaptive Urban Airspace Management) enabling large scale mixed-mode unmanned aircraft (UA) operations in the urban environment. The main motivation is to determine the appropriate route network (RN) for UA operations by taking into consideration several salient factors, including performance of UA, performance of airspace, types of mission, risks, and topography of the urban infrastructure. As the demand profile for UA to operate in the urban airspace is dynamic and varies throughout the day and night, it is not practical to have one fixed network configuration to serve all types of UA operations. The proposed work studies the performance of three types of route network, namely route network in AirMatrix, route network over Buildings, and route network over Roads, through two associated indices, capacity and throughput. The ability to establish the capacity and throughput of the urban airspace for each type of route network would enhance the assessment and management of the limited urban airspace. Hence, the research and development of Adaptive Urban Airspace (AdUrA) concept is critical and necessary to manage the airspace effectively, safely, and efficiently, particularly in balancing demand and capacity of the urban airspace. To enable the formulation of AdUrA, a preliminary study on a type of mission is conducted for an urban town in Singapore. The 3D airspace and associated urban infrastructures are modelled and simulated in the performance analysis. The results of capacity and throughput for each route network configured are then obtained and discussed.