Comprehensive Risk Assessment and Utilization for Contingency Management of Future AAM System

Abstract

This paper presents a risk assessment methodology to be used in the future Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) systems especially for supporting the planning phase and onboard contingency management solutions. Two types of dynamic risk maps are introduced as Contingency Risk Map that includes the probability of observing a contingency onboard and Risk Severity Map which covers various sources of data such as population density, a dense air traffic, obstacles, terrain, no-fly zones, and so forth. Contingency Risk Map is to quantify the probability of having a contingency and decide if the quantified probability is above the threshold. If the contingency risk probability is at unacceptable limit, Risk Severity Map assists to select a pre-defined secure emergency landing zone or non-secure emergency landing zone defined onboard. The developed risk assessment structure is tested through two different use cases. First one is about defining locations as vertiport alternatives based on the generated map, in case of a contingency ending up with an AAM vehicle to do emergency landing. Second case considers minimum risk onboard rerouting of an AAM vehicle to a secure/non-secure emergency landing zone under contingency management process. The main objective of this work is to build a system-wide contingency management concept for the AAM system by supporting with UTM services such as risk analysis assistance.