Esrat Farhana Dulia

Esrat Farhana Dulia, Syed Arbab Mohd Shihab, Caleb Adams et al.

Safe Advanced Air Mobility operations require aircraft to maintain separation when surveillance information is noisy, delayed, incomplete, or temporarily unavailable. This study develops a Deep Q-Network-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning framework for decentralized conflict resolution among heterogeneous small unmanned aerial vehicles and electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft operating within a structured three-dimensional corridor. Separate policies are trained for the two aircraft categories using local observations and a 14-action space that includes maintaining course, turning, vertical maneuvering, landing, and speed control. The simulation incorporates aircraft-specific dynamics, energy use, corridor constraints, observation noise, communication delay, information dropout, wind disturbance, actuator uncertainty, and model uncertainty. The trained policies are evaluated across 90 combinations of traffic density and minimum separation thresholds. Loss-of-separation frequency and duration generally increase with traffic density and separation requirements, although most events are resolved within 1s. Under safe conditions, agents maintain their motion approximately 79% of the time. During conflicts, turning accounts for 33% of actions, followed by maintaining motion at 29%, speed control at 25%, and vertical maneuvers at 13%. Six Pareto-optimal configurations reveal trade-offs between safety and corridor capacity. The framework supports the simulation-based evaluation of safer AAM conflict-resolution strategies under degraded surveillance conditions.

Esrat Farhana Dulia, Caleb Adams, Syed Arbab Mohd Shihab et al.

Ensuring the safe and efficient operation of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) in low-altitude airspace requires a reliable, robust, and resilient surveillance system capable of continuously detecting, identifying, and tracking aircraft under both normal and off-nominal conditions. To address this need, this study develops a comprehensive 3R modeling framework, reliability, robustness, and resilience, for the Surveillance for Advanced Air Mobility (SAM) system, with a focus on the optimal design and operation of a multi-type sensor network. Under normal operating conditions, the reliability model determines the baseline sensor types, quantities, and locations required to satisfy surveillance coverage and detection requirements. To address external perturbations, such as adverse weather conditions or sudden increases in AAM traffic demand, the robustness model identifies additional sensor requirements needed to maintain system performance. Furthermore, for surveillance outages caused by primary sensor failures, the resiliency model develops backup sensor deployment and dispatch strategies to provide temporary surveillance coverage, minimize operational disruptions, and support the safe continuation of AAM operations.

Esrat Farhana Dulia, Amina Dhaher, Raiful Hasan et al.

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is an emerging low-altitude air transportation system whose successful deployment depends not only on technological advancement but also on public acceptance. This acceptance will drive government support, regulations, noise standards, and willingness to fly, and in turn the overall commercial viability of AAM. Understanding public sentiment toward AAM is therefore essential for identifying its societal barriers and informing its adoption strategies. This study analyzes 306,009 human-generated texts collected from Reddit and Quora to examine public discourse on AAM using AI-based models. Because multiple sentiment analysis models exist, identifying the most accurate model is critical for reliable AAM sentiment prediction and trustworthy public opinion analysis. Accordingly, seven models spanning lexicon-based, machine learning, deep learning, and transformer-based approaches are evaluated for AAM-specific sentiment classification. ModernBERT achieves the best classification performance and is used to label the full dataset. Using the resulting sentiment labels, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is applied within each sentiment class to uncover latent topics in public opinion. The analysis identifies 20 distinct topics and traces their temporal evolution from 2008 to 2025. A cross-sentiment topic analysis further reveals six major clusters of public concern: workforce and skill development (25.29% of the dataset), regulation and compliance (24.64%), technical performance of drones (20.99%), military, geopolitics, and defense (14.58%), safety and operational risks (8.51%), and noise and disturbance (5.98%). Based on these findings, this study provides actionable strategies to address these concerns, thereby, improving public acceptance and support AAM deployment.