Integrated Airborne Urban Mobility: A Multidisciplinary View

A special issue of Aerospace (ISSN 2226-4310). This special issue belongs to the section "Air Traffic and Transportation".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2024) | Viewed by 3736

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Institut für Luftransportsysteme an der TUHH, Blohmstr. 20, 21079 Hamburg, Germany
Interests: aerospace; rotorcraft; military air systems; aviation; mission analysis; systems design; air transportation systems; urban air mobility; U-space; aircraft design; climate impact of aviation; sustainability; mission efficiency
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Guest Editor
Institute of Flight Systems, Bundeswehr University Munich, 85577 Neubiberg, Germany
Interests: air transportation; data-driven and model-based environments; predictive analysis; integrated airspace and airport management
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Urban Air Mobility is a new air transportation concept, which may contribute to achieving more sustainable airborne travel. The project “iLUM” was funded by the Hamburgerian Ministry of Science, Research, Equality and Districts (BWFGB) to develop a holistic methodology for the feasibility and value analysis of urban air transportation.

The project team, representing public law, societal science, aerospace science, transportation science, city planning, and automation and communication systems academics, collaborated for 3 years.

This Special Issue in Aerospace documents the main achievements in different fields in separate papers. In addition, a summarizing overview of model-based simulation and urban air mobility feasibility in Hamburg is given. 

As the spokesman of the project, I am delighted that the project team has the opportunity to present all their multidisciplinary achievements in a comprehensive format. It is fairly rare that legal and societal research results on Urban Air Mobility are presented together with technical and operational issues.

Prof. Dr. Volker Gollnick
Prof. Dr. Michael Schultz
Guest Editors

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 15097 KiB  
Article
A Method for Air Route Network Planning of Urban Air Mobility
by Jie Li, Di Shen, Fuping Yu and Duo Qi
Aerospace 2024, 11(7), 584; https://doi.org/10.3390/aerospace11070584 - 16 Jul 2024
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1186
Abstract
Urban air mobility is an effective solution to address the current issue of ground traffic congestion in future cities. However, as the user scale continues to expand, the current civil aviation flight scheduling and control methods are becoming inadequate to meet the high-volume [...] Read more.
Urban air mobility is an effective solution to address the current issue of ground traffic congestion in future cities. However, as the user scale continues to expand, the current civil aviation flight scheduling and control methods are becoming inadequate to meet the high-volume flight guarantee demands of future urban air transportation. In order to effectively handle and resolve potential issues in this field in the future, this paper proposes a method for planning urban air mobility route networks. The planning process is divided into two stages: construction and optimization. Methods for constructing urban air mobility route networks based on flight routes and global optimization methods based on node movement are proposed in each stage. In the construction stage, a complete construction process is designed to generate routes based on existing flight routes, in line with the trend of urban air transportation development. In the optimization stage, inspired by the ant colony algorithm, node transfer rules and information transfer rules are incorporated to design a global optimization process and algorithm for route networks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and advancement of the proposed planning method. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Integrated Airborne Urban Mobility: A Multidisciplinary View)
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26 pages, 2861 KiB  
Article
Real-Time On-the-Fly Motion Planning for Urban Air Mobility via Updating Tree Data of Sampling-Based Algorithms Using Neural Network Inference
by Junlin Lou, Burak Yuksek, Gokhan Inalhan and Antonios Tsourdos
Aerospace 2024, 11(1), 99; https://doi.org/10.3390/aerospace11010099 - 22 Jan 2024
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1731
Abstract
In this study, we consider the problem of motion planning for urban air mobility applications to generate a minimal snap trajectory and trajectory that cost minimal time to reach a goal location in the presence of dynamic geo-fences and uncertainties in the urban [...] Read more.
In this study, we consider the problem of motion planning for urban air mobility applications to generate a minimal snap trajectory and trajectory that cost minimal time to reach a goal location in the presence of dynamic geo-fences and uncertainties in the urban airspace. We have developed two separate approaches for this problem because designing an algorithm individually for each objective yields better performance. The first approach that we propose is a decoupled method that includes designing a policy network based on a recurrent neural network for a reinforcement learning algorithm, and then combining an online trajectory generation algorithm to obtain the minimal snap trajectory for the vehicle. Additionally, in the second approach, we propose a coupled method using a generative adversarial imitation learning algorithm for training a recurrent-neural-network-based policy network and generating the time-optimized trajectory. The simulation results show that our approaches have a short computation time when compared to other algorithms with similar performance while guaranteeing sufficient exploration of the environment. In urban air mobility operations, our approaches are able to provide real-time on-the-fly motion re-planning for vehicles, and the re-planned trajectories maintain continuity for the executed trajectory. To the best of our knowledge, we propose one of the first approaches enabling one to perform an on-the-fly update of the final landing position and to optimize the path and trajectory in real-time while keeping explorations in the environment. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Integrated Airborne Urban Mobility: A Multidisciplinary View)
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