Metropolis II: Investigating the Future Shape of Air Traffic Control in Highly Dense Urban Airspace

Niki Patrinopoulou (1) , Ioannis Daramouskas (1) , Vaios Lappas (1) , V. Kostopoulos (1) , Andres Morfin Veytia (2) , Calin Andrei Badea (2) , Joost Ellerbroek (2) , Jacco Hoekstra (2) , V. de Vries (3) , Jacomijn van Ham (3) , Emmanuel Sunil (3) , P. Menendez Ponte Alonso (4) , J. Pedrero Gonzalez (4) , Denis Bereziat (5) , Andrija Vidosavljevic (6) , Leonid Sedov (7)

1 University of Patras
2 TU Delft - Delft University of Technology
3 NLR - National Aerospace Laboratory [Amsterdam]
4 NTT DATA
5 ENAC-LAB - Laboratoire de recherche ENAC
6 ENAC - Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile
7 LIU - Linköping University

Metropolis II aims to provide insights in what is needed to enable high-density urban air operations. It does this by investigating the foundation for U-space U3/U4 services. The final goal is to provide a unified approach for strategic deconfliction, tactical deconfliction, and dynamic capacity management. Highly-dense operations in constrained urban airspace will likely require a degree of complexity that does not exist in modern-day air traffic management. The expected high traffic demand will require a shared use of the airspace instead of assigning exclusive use of blocks of the airspace to some flights. A unified approach for traffic management is needed because at high-densities, airspace design, flight planning, and separation management become increasingly interdependent. Metropolis II builds upon the results of the first Metropolis project. Three concepts with a varying degree of centralisation will be compared using simulations. (1) The centralised concept will take a global approach for separation management. (2) The decentralised concept aims to give the individual agents separation responsibility. (3) The hybrid concept tries to combine a centralised strategic planning agent with a robust tactical separation strategy.

Domaines: Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]

Niki Patrinopoulou, Ioannis Daramouskas, Vaios Lappas, V. Kostopoulos, Andres Morfin Veytia, et al.. Metropolis II: Investigating the Future Shape of Air Traffic Control in Highly Dense Urban Airspace. 30th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (MED), Jun 2022, Athenes, Greece. pp.649-655, ⟨10.1109/MED54222.2022.9837201⟩. ⟨hal-03827242⟩