Towards Planning Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Landing Trajectories in Emergencies

Ground transportation in dense urban environments has been facing challenges for many years (e.g., congestion and resilience) and the problem of congestion in urban environments will become more significant with the growth of populations and urbanization. In the past few years, the industry and the scientific communities have invested resources towards creating new ideas to improve urban transportation performance, such as the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) concept. Therefore, emergencies are considered a pivotal aspect to be managed appropriately to ensure safe UAM operations. Although normal operations represent a challenge nowadays (e.g., performance and social acceptance), emergencies are even more challenging due to the safety-critical risks. Thereupon, the main goal of this research is to propose the Landing Trajectory Planner for Emergencies in UAM Operations (LTPE), using Parallel Metaheuristics and considering autonomous vehicles’ presence. This trajectory planning method aims to design landing trajectories for multiple Electrical Vertical Take-off and Landing (eVTOL) vehicles in normal conditions and in emergencies. LTPE considers different eVTOL configurations in piloting systems (i.e., piloted vehicles, remotely piloted vehicles, and fully autonomous vehicles) as well as different vehicle priorities. Three landing modes are used for vehicles in emergency conditions: (i) land at the originally designed skyport; (ii) land at the nearest skyport; and (iii) land on the ground) and all metaheuristics include an early stopping feature. The experiments showed that LTPE can propose safe and efficient solutions for several scenarios with a short response time.