Unmanned aircraft system demand generation and airspace performance impact prediction

Abstract

Modeling and simulations of three future unmanned aircraft system (UAS) missions are described in this paper: air quality monitoring, wildfire monitoring, and on-demand air taxi. These missions are expected to have high benefit-to-cost ratio, and hence, a high potential for early adoption and integration into the national airspace system (NAS). Due to lack of historical data, input from subject matter experts involved in the air quality and wildfire monitoring domains was obtained to understand the challenges involved in modeling these two missions. On the other hand, the on-demand air taxi mission involved a strong socio-economic component, wherein the general public is directly involved in influencing the characteristics of the mission. Consequently, an activity-based modeling approach was adopted to model this mission. Demand data for the three missions were compiled into standard flight data sets (FDSs) that can be distributed to researchers across academia and the industry to conduct various impact studies on the integration of UAS into NAS. Since this research is part of an ongoing project, details of initial simulations and analyses conducted using these FDSs will also be described. NAS performance in the simulations was measured in terms of number of blind-encounter events and flight delays, before and after the introduction of UAS flights. Blindencounters are separation violations that occur in a hypothetical uncontrolled airspace.

Strategies to Model System Risk Using UAS Safety Analysis Model (USAM)

“…These flights data sets were obtained from Ref. 2 and are carefully planned so as to avoid interactions with manned traffic. All UAS flights operated from small non-towered airports.…”

The Generic Resolution Advisor and Conflict Evaluator (GRACE) for Detect-And-Avoid (DAA) Systems

“…2. NAS-wide: uses projected UAS mission profiles developed under prior work 45 and recorded VFR traffic data 46 for a more realistic encounter model.…”

“…Eighteen UAS mission profiles developed under prior work were used in this study to simulate a variety of UAS aircraft conducting an assortment of possible future UAS missions, including: point-to-point transport, regional mapping/monitoring, and patrol. 13,45 The 24-hour scenario included more than 17,000 UAS flights with about 10,000 total flight hours, mostly in transitional class E airspace in proximity to VFR traffic. 45 It was assumed that all unmanned aircraft were equipped with cooperative ADS-B and MODE-C sensors and a non-cooperative directional sensor with 8-nmi range typical for onboard radars.…”

Investigating Detect-and-Avoid Surveillance Performance for Unmanned Aircraft Systems

“…It involves nine different types of UAS missions, including wildfire monitoring, air quality monitoring, flood inundation and stream monitoring, air taxi transport, cargo delivery, and atmospheric sampling missions. 11 These missions constitute a total of 18,256 simulated UAS flights over the course of a single day. Each mission uses different types of UAS models such as RQ7A, MQ9A, RQ4, and C510.…”