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Advanced air mobility (AAM) is an emerging sector in aviation aiming to offer secure, efficient, and eco-friendly transportation utilizing electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. These vehicles are designed for short-haul flights, transporting passengers and cargo between urban centers, suburbs, and remote areas. As the number of flights is expected to rise significantly in congested metropolitan areas, there is a need for a digital ecosystem to support the AAM platform. This ecosystem requires seamless integration of air traffic management systems, ground control systems, and communication networks, enabling effective communication between AAM vehicles and ground systems to ensure safe and efficient operations. Consequently, the aviation industry is seeking to develop a new aerospace framework that promotes shared aerospace practices, ensuring the safety, sustainability, and efficiency of air traffic operations. However, the lack of adequate wireless coverage in congested cities and disconnected rural communities poses challenges for large-scale AAM deployments. In the immediate recovery phase, incorporating AAM with new air-to-ground connectivity presents difficulties such as overwhelming the terrestrial network with data requests, maintaining link reliability, and managing handover occurrences. Furthermore, managing eVTOL traffic in urban areas with congested airspace necessitates high levels of connectivity to support air routing information for eVTOL vehicles. This paper introduces a novel concept addressing future flight challenges and proposes a framework for integrating operations, infrastructure, connectivity, and ecosystems in future air mobility. Specifically, it includes a performance analysis to illustrate the impact of extensive AAM vehicle mobility on ground base station network infrastructure in urban environments. This work aims to pave the way for future air mobility by introducing a new vision for backbone infrastructure that supports safe and sustainable aviation through advanced communication technology.
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The Impact of Accessible Advanced Air Mobility Services on Economy, Education, and Workforce Development
This paper addresses the proposed air corridor planned to be established between the University of North Texas (UNT) and Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma (CNO), a model for accessible Advance Air Mobility (AAM) service. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) defines AAM as “safe, sustainable, affordable, and accessible aviation for transformational local and intra-regional missions" [1] and AAM missions as rural and urban operations that occur below ranges of 300 nautical miles, including passenger carrying and cargo delivery technologies.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2148178
- PAR ID:
- 10407419
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Society of Engineering Education
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The ASEE Gulf Southwest Conference 2023
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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The implementation of automation will enable Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), which could alter the human's responsibilities from those of an active controller to a passive monitor of vehicles. Mature AAM operations will likely rely on both experienced and novice operators to supervise multiple aircraft. As AAM constitutes a complex and increasingly autonomous system, the human operator's set of responsibilities will transition from those of a controller, to a manager, and eventually to an assistant to highly automated systems. The development of AAM will require system designers to characterize these three sets of human responsibilities. The present work proposes different human responsibilities across various roles (i.e., pilot in command, system operator, system assistant) in the context of AAM along with pertinent attention-related constructs that could contribute to each of the three identified roles of AAM operators including situation awareness, workload, complacency, and vigilance.more » « less
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Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) operations are expected to transform air transportation while challenging current air traffic management practices. By introducing a novel market-based mechanism, we address the problem of on-demand allocation of capacity-constrained airspace to AAM vehicles with heterogeneous and private valuations. We model airspace and air infrastructure as a collection of contiguous regions (or sectors) with constraints on the number of vehicles that simultaneously enter, stay, or exit each region. Vehicles request access to airspace with trajectories spanning multiple regions at different times. We use the graph structure of our airspace model to formulate the allocation problem as a path allocation problem on a time-extended graph. To ensure that the cost information of AAM vehicles remains private, we introduce a novel mechanism that allocates each vehicle a budget of “air-credits” (an artificial currency) and anonymously charges prices for traversing the edges of the time-extended graph. We seek to compute a competitive equilibrium that ensures that: (i) capacity constraints are satisfied, (ii) a strictly positive resource price implies that the sector capacity is fully utilized, and (iii) the allocation is integral and optimal for each AAM vehicle given current prices, without requiring access to individual vehicle utilities. However, a competitive equilibrium with integral allocations may not always exist. We provide sufficient conditions for the existence and computation of a fractional-competitive equilibrium, where allocations can be fractional. Building on these theoretical insights, we propose a distributed, iterative, two-step algorithm that: (1) computes a fractional competitive equilibrium, and (2) derives an integral allocation from this equilibrium. We validate the effectiveness of our approach in allocating trajectories for the emerging urban air mobility service of drone delivery.more » « less
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Advanced air mobility (AAM) has introduced a new mode of air transportation that can be integrated, providing services including air taxis, which can quickly transport people and cargo from one place to another. However, urban airspace is already congested with commercial air traffic, so there is a need for an efficient and autonomous airspace management system. Establishing structured air corridors and enabling UAS-to-UAS (U2U) communications are essential to achieve autonomy. Air corridors are designated airspace primarily reserved for AAM traffic, which will streamline the movement of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). Meanwhile, U2U communications facilitate efficient collision avoidance strategies (CAS). A key aspect of this system is the development of CAS, which requires advanced communication protocols to monitor traffic patterns and detect potential collisions. This paper explores designing and implementing CAS using U2U communications. Use cases for U2U communications include merging, minimum separation, information relay, collaborative sensing, and rerouting. All these use cases demand real-time solutions for managing traffic conflicts involving multiple UAS. The CAS discussed in this paper utilizes U2U communications to mitigate the risk of collisions in the airspace and demonstrates how U2U communications can assist in efficient AAM traffic management through simulations.more » « less
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Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) presents an emerging alternative to traditional car driving for commuting in metropolitan areas. However, its feasibility has not been thoroughly studied nor well understood at the operational level. Given that AAM has not been in place, this study explores the economic, energy, and environmental feasibility of AAM for commuting at an early stage of AAM deployment. We propose a time expanded network model to characterize the dynamics of eVTOL operations between a vertiport pair in different states: in-service flying, relocation flying, charging, and parking, while respecting various operational and commuter time window constraints. By jointly considering eVTOL flying with vertiport access and egress and using real-world data, we demonstrate an application of the model in the Chicago metropolitan area in the US. Different vertiport pairs and eVTOL aircraft models are investigated. We find substantial travel time saving if commuting by AAM. While vehicle operating cost will be higher using eVTOLs than using auto, the generalized travel cost will be less for commuters. On the other hand, with current eVTOL power requirement, the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of AAM will be greater than those of auto driving, with an important contributor being the significance presence of empty flights relocation. These findings, along with sensitivity analysis, shed light on future eVTOL development to enhance the competitiveness of AAM as a viable option for commuting.more » « less
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