GRID‐Routing: A Proposal for Massive Traffic Management in Urban Air Mobility

ABSTRACT

Urban air mobility (UAM) addresses the integration of aircraft in urban areas, seeking a safe and efficient handling of aerial space resources. This becomes particularly challenging as the number of aircraft grows, requiring novel strategies to automate such management on a large scale. This paper presents a novel proposal for the massive management of urban air traffic. First, a flight plan model is proposed that allows precise control of the aircraft's behavior, as well as a smooth connection between the different waypoints composing the mission to be carried out. Second, a novel paradigm for urban airspace management is proposed through the introduction of a regular grid, which is used to establish the different routes that the aircraft must follow, and allows for space‐time reservation of resources. The resulting routes can thus be transformed into precise and conflict‐free flight plans with other aircraft. Through various validation experiments, including system load tests, it is shown that the proposed solution is feasible and allows for correct and efficient management of even very high volumes of aircraft in a defined airspace volume.