Combining Strategic and Tactical Conflict Management in Urban Air Mobility Environments

As Urban Air Mobility (UAM) evolves toward high-density operations, ensuring safety while minimizing the impact to air traffic control becomes critical. Toward that end, this paper explores a combination of strategic and tactical conflict management approaches to help maintain safe separation between aircraft in a congested UAM environment through fast-time simulations. Simulations are performed in Class B airspace near New York City using a proposed set of vertiports and routes at tempo and density levels expected in midterm UAM operations. Two pre-flight strategic conflict management (SCM) methods are compared: a baseline scheduler that considers only vertiports and an enhanced scheduler that also considers merging and crossing intersections. For tactical conflict management (TCM), an ownship-centric detect and avoid (DAA) capability that is parameterized by a well-clear volume was developed and compared over two different volumes. Results from these simulations help answer questions in UAM environments about the effectiveness of different SCM methods, how much additional improvement a TCM capability provides, what the tradeoffs are in terms of nuisance alerts versus loss of separation for more or less conservative TCM parameters, where conflicts tend to occur, and how often secondary conflicts arise after the TCM capability alters the course of an aircraft to avoid an initial conflict.