Safety-Assured Arrival Scheduling in Sequential UAM Corridor Sections under Speed and Separation Constraints
Provides a safety-assured scheduling rule for UAM corridor operations, addressing a key bottleneck in integrating UAM into air traffic management.
This paper proposes an analytical method to compute a sufficient ETA gap at constrained waypoints that guarantees longitudinal separation in UAM corridors with heterogeneous speed limits. Numerical simulations show that the mechanism avoids collisions and improves traffic flow compared to unscheduled operations.
This paper presents a safety-assured arrival-scheduling framework for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) corridor operations. We propose an analytical method to compute a sufficient ETA gap at Constrained Waypoints (CWPs) that guarantees longitudinal separation along sequential corridor sections with heterogeneous speed limits. The resulting ETA-gap condition depends on section-specific speed bounds and the required separation distance, providing an efficiently computable rule suitable for integration into future digital ETA-scheduling and air traffic management systems. We show that the computed ETA gap ensures safe separation across all corridor sections under prescribed section travel times and speed limits. Numerical simulations for a decreasing-speed corridor confirm that vehicles coordinated with the proposed mechanism adjust their speeds to maintain the required spacing, avoid potential collisions, and support improved traffic flow compared with unscheduled operations.