Efficient Voxel-Based Updating of Changing Low-Altitude Conditions for Prismatic Airspace Topologies

The safe and scalable integration of drones into complex urban low-altitude airspace relies heavily on precise and real-time environmental modeling. However, the extreme volatility of low-altitude environments, often disrupted by dynamic obstacles and Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs), poses a severe challenge to existing digital airspace platforms. To address this bottleneck, this paper proposes a rapid airspace environment updating scheme tailored for varying airspace topologies, specifically focusing on prismatic volumes, with a novel EB (Edge-Begin/Edge-End) topology update algorithm as its core contribution. By evaluating local boundary topologies and deploying a deterministic computational scanline, the EB algorithm transforms complex 3D restricted zones into continuous, gap-free voxel sets for high efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that, compared with baselines, our method reduces processing time by over 99% (11.67 s vs. >35,000 s at province level) and peak memory by over 95% (39.73 MB vs. 838.97 MB), while guaranteeing a 0% missed-voxel rate. It also exhibits excellent scalability from district to province.

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Publication Details

Journal
Aerospace
Published
2026-11-10
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/aerospace13111050
Primary Topic
Air Traffic Management and Optimization
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Efficient Voxel-Based Updating of Changing Low-Altitude Conditions for Prismatic Airspace Topologies

Qinglei Kong, Hang Zhao, Bo Chen, Yamin Zhang et al.
Aerospace
Air Traffic Management and Optimization
article

Efficient Voxel-Based Updating of Changing Low-Altitude Conditions for Prismatic Airspace Topologies

Qinglei Kong, Hang Zhao, Bo Chen, Yamin Zhang, Kaiyu Nie, Bin Hu, Rong Xu
article en

Abstract

The safe and scalable integration of drones into complex urban low-altitude airspace relies heavily on precise and real-time environmental modeling. However, the extreme volatility of low-altitude environments, often disrupted by dynamic obstacles and Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs), poses a severe challenge to existing digital airspace platforms. To address this bottleneck, this paper proposes a rapid airspace environment updating scheme tailored for varying airspace topologies, specifically focusing on prismatic volumes, with a novel EB (Edge-Begin/Edge-End) topology update algorithm as its core contribution. By evaluating local boundary topologies and deploying a deterministic computational scanline, the EB algorithm transforms complex 3D restricted zones into continuous, gap-free voxel sets for high efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that, compared with baselines, our method reduces processing time by over 99% (11.67 s vs. >35,000 s at province level) and peak memory by over 95% (39.73 MB vs. 838.97 MB), while guaranteeing a 0% missed-voxel rate. It also exhibits excellent scalability from district to province.

AerospaceVol. 13(11)
Civil Aviation Administration of China (CN), Harbin Institute of Technology (CN)
Air Traffic Management and Optimization
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