Estimating Airspace Resource Capacity for Advanced Air Mobility Operations

Demand capacity balancing (DCB) has been proposed as a strategic mechanism to balance efficiency and predictability for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) operations when operational uncertainties are high. In this paper, we seek to determine how DCB can be implemented to ensure safe and efficient UAM operations in coordination with a tactical deconfliction system. We use simulations to explore the safety of representative UAM operations applying tactical deconfliction methods, and estimate airspace resource capacities that could be applied, using DCB, to ensure safe and efficient UAM operations. We apply this approach to determine airspace capacity in two baseline route structures - simulating merging flows and crossing flows respectively - which are then applied to a hypothetical UAM network in New York City. The benefits of DCB to support tactical deconfliction for safety assurance across a range of demand values is demonstrated and compared to safety metrics applying tactical deconfliction only, and to a baseline without DCB or tactical deconfliction. In addition, we also show the trade-off between ground delay and safety metrics while implementing various levels of DCB. The results suggest that DCB may be a feasible mechanism to ensure safe and efficient UAM operations. The results also reveal some early insights into interactions between the strategic DCB and the tactical deconfliction.