Heuristic Approach for Arrival Management of Aircraft in On-Demand Urban Air Mobility

The arrival sequencing and scheduling problem have been formulated in the urban air mobility (UAM) context for homogeneous and mixed fleets of electric vertical takeoff and landing (EVTOL) aircraft (winged/wingless) expected to land on a vertiport. In this paper, a novel UAM airspace design concept has been proposed to separate arrival air traffic of wingless EVTOL aircraft from winged EVTOL aircraft until merging at the metering fix. Two separate vertiport arrival procedures have also been proposed for the problem based on anticipated UAM traffic density in emergent (low) and early expanded (moderate/high) operations, as proposed by NASA. The objective of the problem is to minimize the makespan (landing completion time) of a given set of EVTOL aircraft. A heuristic approach called insertion and local search combined with two different scheduling methods called 1) mixed-integer linear programming and 2) time advance are proposed to minimize the makespan of the mixed fleet of EVTOL aircraft. Next, the impact of the number of landing pads N on the makespan is studied to aid in early expanded UAM operations. Finally, sensitivity analysis is performed to see the impact of the following on the sequencing and scheduling algorithms: 1) the number of EVTOL aircraft expected to land n and 2) the number of EVTOL aircraft used in the local neighborhood search k. Through numerical simulations and sensitivity analysis, our algorithms demonstrated real-time scheduling capabilities; therefore, they can be potentially used for on-demand UAM arrival operations. © 2020, AIAA International. All rights reserved.