Caleb Adams

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.