Traffic capacity increase in layered UTM airspace through traffic rule improvement

In the future, a large number of small unmanned aircraft are expected to fly in the airspace above urban area for the purpose of package delivery and infrastructure inspection, etc. Therefore, safe and efficient operation algorithm of small unmanned aircraft is needed to be enforced. To increase the traffic capacity of small unmanned aircraft at the stage of flight planning, appropriate planning rules that is suitable for UAS Traffic Management are needed to be imposed. In this paper, the simulation of the flight planning of unmanned aircraft in layered airspace above the Tokyo area is carried out in order to determine the maximum traffic capacity. This paper proposes traffic rules which are able to improve the traffic capacity of the airspace for the UAS Traffic Management. In the flight planning phase of Unmanned Traffic Management, new flights are placed so as not to interfere with already determined flights of other small unmanned aircraft. Through numerical simulations, it has been revealed that the number of approved flights by an algorithm that provides a shortest trajectory decreases with the number of no-fly zone. In contrast, an algorithm that defines the direction to avoid the no-fly zones is able to increase the number of approved flights with the number of the no-fy zones, which can automatically forms smooth traffic flows.