Protocol-Based Congestion Management for Advanced Air Mobility
- 1 January 2023
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) in Journal of Air Transportation
- Vol. 31 (1), 35-44
- https://doi.org/10.2514/1.d0298
Abstract
Advanced air mobility operations are expected to significantly increase the demand for limited airspace resources. Two key features distinguish advanced air mobility operations from commercial aviation. First, unlike commercial aviation, where flight schedules are set months in advance, advanced air mobility demand is dynamic (i.e., flights are planned with a much shorter lead-time). Thus, operators benefit from planning in shorter time horizons and can confidently share their desired flight trajectories only for the near future. In addition, operators may be unwilling to share estimates of the full trajectory, for competitive reasons. The second key feature is the large-scale of operations. Thus, a centralized optimization approach may not scale to meet the expected levels of demand, and it offers no redundancy against communication failures. In this paper, we address these challenges by designing a protocol that determines the “rules-of-the-road” for airspace access. Our protocol centers on the construction of priority queues to determine access to each congested volume of airspace. We leverage the concepts of backpressure (measure of queue buildup) and cycle detection (vehicles that block each other from proceeding) to promote efficiency, and present several flight- and operator-level prioritization schemes. In the absence of actual demand data, we study three scenarios: random origin–destination missions, crossflow traffic patterns, and simulated hub-based package delivery operations. We evaluate our protocols on two performance measures: efficiency (i.e., magnitudes of delays) and fairness (i.e., equitable distribution of delay across flights and operators).Keywords
Funding Information
- NASA University Leadership Initiative (#80NSSC20M0163)
- Airbus (40008574)
This publication has 24 references indexed in Scilit:
- Capacity-Aware Backpressure Traffic Signal ControlIEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, 2014
- Network Congestion Control of Airport Surface OperationsJournal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, 2014
- On the Efficiency-Fairness Trade-offManagement Science, 2012
- Equitable and Efficient Coordination in Traffic Flow ManagementTransportation Science, 2012
- The Price of FairnessOperations Research, 2011
- En-route sector capacity estimation methodologies: An international surveyJournal of Air Transport Management, 2005
- Internet congestion controlIEEE Control Systems, 2002
- Fair scheduling in wireless packet networksIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 1999
- The Air Traffic Flow Management Problem with Enroute CapacitiesOperations Research, 1998
- Solving Optimally the Static Ground-Holding Policy Problem in Air Traffic ControlTransportation Science, 1993