Integrated departure and boundary control for low-altitude air city transport systems

Connectivity and digitalization will enable new control measures in urban air mobility operations and open new ways for integrating these measures in real-time traffic management. Hence, new control strategies can be designed to regulate both demand and supply of Low-Altitude Air city Transport (LAAT) systems. This can be achieved by adjusting aircraft departure times, and manipulating transfer aircraft flows at boundary air regions. In this research, new model-based control strategies are designed, where aircraft departure management and boundary control strategies are integrated. The aviation operation can benefit from the proposed flow-oriented control paradigm, which can balance the LAAT system’s supply and demand, i.e. controlling the transfer flow between airspace regions and simultaneously managing the aircraft departure (inflow). The current paper presents the development of different control strategies: Departure Controller (DC), Boundary Controller (BC), and integrated Departure and Boundary Controller (DBC), with supporting simulation results. The designed controllers are tested in a new LAAT framework that considers modeling and control of LAAT operation while capturing the microscopic and macroscopic levels simultaneously.