*Article* **Strategic and Tactical Path Planning for Urban Air Mobility: Overview and Application to Real-World Use Cases**

**Flavia Causa \* , Armando Franzone and Giancarmine Fasano**

Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Naples "Federico II", P.le Tecchio 80, 80125 Naples, Italy

**\*** Correspondence: flavia.causa@unina.it

**Abstract:** Urban air mobility requires safe and efficient airspace management, as well as effective path planning and decision-making capabilities to enable access to the urban airspace, which is predicted to be very densely populated. This paper tackles the problem of strategic and tactical path planning by presenting a framework specifically designed for accounting for several constraints and issues of the urban environment. Multi-objective and multi-constraint planner algorithms are developed to this aim, along with an innovative method for information simplification and manipulation. Navigationaware and optimized trajectories were retrieved from the strategic approach. Tactical path planning was developed using three approaches that react differently to unpredicted conditions. The entire strategic–tactical pipeline was tested in two real-world use cases, representing common missions in urban environments, such as medical delivery and short-range air taxi. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology in generating the strategic path and show the different outcomes of the proposed tactical approaches, thus highlighting their advantages and drawbacks.

**Keywords:** path planning; urban air mobility; tactical path planning; strategic path planning; urban airspace; urban maps; urban airspace constraints; test cases

**Citation:** Causa, F.; Franzone, A.; Fasano, G. Strategic and Tactical Path Planning for Urban Air Mobility: Overview and Application to Real-World Use Cases. *Drones* **2023**, *7*, 11. https://doi.org/10.3390/ drones7010011

Academic Editor: Kamesh Namuduri

Received: 18 November 2022 Revised: 14 December 2022 Accepted: 22 December 2022 Published: 24 December 2022

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).
