Resilient conflict detection and resolution for high-uncertainty constrained urban airspace operations

The concept of urban air mobility is rapidly advancing, with much research being dedicated towards the development of the air traffic management services required for such operations. An important component of unmanned air traffic management (U-space/UTM) is conflict detection and resolution (CD&R), tasked with ensuring the operational safety of such systems. Strategic flight plan optimisation and tactical CD&R methods have generally been studied independently, leading to suboptimal performance when deployed simultaneously in simulated high-density very-low-level constrained urban airspace environments. Furthermore, the limited flexibility of pre-departure 4D trajectory planning methods towards dynamic and uncertain environmental and operational conditions (i.e., wind and delay) produces a degradation in safety that is difficult to mitigate using tactical manoeuvring. In this work, we design a traffic-flow capacity strategic optimisation method that aims to achieve robustness against flight plan deviations and to better complement tactical CD&R manoeuvring. The performance of the proposed strategic and tactical deconfliction module is tested within constrained urban airspace traffic scenarios simulated using the BlueSky Open Air Traffic Simulator. The results are compared with other methods, such as 4D trajectory planning and state-based CD&R. • U-space operations in very-low-level require strategic flight deconfliction. • Current proposed methods approach the problem as a static optimisation. • Such methods are negatively affected by the presence of uncertainties. • We propose a different approach that focuses on strategic plan resilience. • Traffic is better distributed, making tactical manoeuvring more effective.