Eixão-UAM: LLM-assisted iterative design of a low-altitude urban air mobility corridor in Brasilia

The development of urban air mobility (UAM) systems requires scalable, regulation-aware planning of low-altitude airspace and supporting infrastructure. This study proposes an end-to-end framework for the design, simulation, and iterative optimization of a structured UAM corridor over Brasilia’s central road axis (Eixão-UAM), aligned with the Brazilian unmanned aircraft traffic management (BR-UTM) ecosystem. In addition, this study proposes a multilayered aerial configuration stratified by unmanned aerial vehicle class, supported by a modular ground infrastructure composed of vertihubs, vertiports, and vertistops. A takeoff-scheduling simulator is developed to evaluate platform allocation strategies under realistic traffic and weather conditions. Initial experiments compare a round-robin (RR) baseline with a genetic algorithm (GA), and results reveal that RR outperforms GA v1 in terms of the average waiting time. To address this gap, a large language model (LLM) assisted optimization loop is implemented using GPT-4o Mini and Gemini 2.5 Pro. The LLMs act as reasoning partners, supporting the root-cause diagnoses, fitness function redesign, and rapid prototyping of five GA variants. Among these, GA v5 achieves a 59.62% reduction in maximum waiting time and an approximately 10% reduction in average waiting time over GA v1, thereby approaching the robustness of RR. In contrast, GA v2–v4 and GA v6 perform less consistently, showing an importance of fitness function design. These results underscore the role of an iterative, LLM-guided development in enhancing classical optimization, demonstrating that generative artificial intelligence (AI) can contribute to simulation acceleration and the cocreation of operational logic. The proposed method provides a replicable blueprint for integrating LLMs into early-stage UAM planning, offering both theoretical insights and architectural guidance for future low-altitude airspace systems.