A route network planning method for urban air delivery. (October 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: He, Xinyu; He, Fang; Li, Lishuai; Zhang, Lei; Xiao, Gang
• Is Part Of: Transportation research. Volume 166(2022)
• Publication Date: 2022-10
• Subjects: Urban air delivery -- Urban air mobility -- Unmanned aircraft system traffic management -- Multi-path planning; Logistics -- Periodicals; Transportation -- Periodicals; 388.011
• DOI: 10.1016/j.tre.2022.102872
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1366-5545

Abstract

Abstract: High-tech giants and start-ups are investing in drone technologies to provide urban air delivery service, which is expected to solve the last-mile problem and mitigate road traffic congestion. However, air delivery service will not scale up without proper traffic management for drones in dense urban environment. Currently, a range of Concepts of Operations (ConOps) for unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM) are being proposed and evaluated by researchers, operators, and regulators. Among these, the tube-based (or corridor-based) ConOps has emerged in operations in some regions of the world for drone deliveries and is expected to continue serving certain scenarios that with dense and complex airspace and requires centralized control in the future. Towards the tube-based ConOps, we develop a route network planning method to design routes (tubes) in a complex urban environment in this paper. In this method, we propose a priority structure to decouple the network planning problem, which is NP-hard, into single-path planning problems. We also introduce a novel space cost function to enable the design of dense and aligned routes in a network. The proposed method is tested on various scenarios and compared with other state-of-the-art methods. Results show that our method can generate near-optimal route networks with significant computational time-savings. Highlights: Developed a path planning method to design a route network for urban air delivery in certain areas. Proposed a prioritization framework to decouple multi-path planning into single-path planning. Created a novel space cost function to design network with dense and aligned routes. Showed faster computational time of the proposed method compared to other state-of-art methods. Demonstrated the method in a real-world scenario.