The accurate estimation of airspace capacity in unmanned traffic management (UTM) operations is critical for a safe, efficient, and equitable allocation of airspace system resources. While conventional approaches for assessing airspace complexity certainly exist, these methods fail to capture true airspace capacity, since they fail to address several important variables (such as weather). Meanwhile, existing AI-based decision-support systems evince opacity and inexplicability, and this restricts their practical application. With these challenges in mind, the authors propose a tailored solution to the needs of demand and capacity management (DCM) services. This solution, by deploying a synthesized fuzzy rule-based model and deep learning will address the trade-off between explicability and performance. In doing so, it will generate an intelligent system that will be explicable and reasonably comprehensible. The results show that this advisory system will be able to indicate the most appropriate regions for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs) operation, and it will also increase UTM airspace availability by more than 23%. Moreover, the proposed system demonstrates a maximum capacity gain of 65% and a minimum safety gain of 35%, while possessing an explainability attribute of 70%. This will assist UTM authorities through more effective airspace capacity estimation and the formulation of new operational regulations and performance requirements.

The research community has paid great attention to the prediction of air traffic flows. Nonetheless, research examining the prediction of air traffic patterns for unmanned aircraft traffic management (UTM) is relatively sparse at present. Thus, this paper proposes a one-dimensional convolutional neural network and encoder-decoder LSTM framework to integrate air traffic flow prediction with the intrinsic complexity metric. This adapted complexity metric takes into account the important differences between ATM and UTM operations, such as dynamic flow structures and airspace density. Additionally, the proposed methodology has been evaluated and verified in a simulation scenario environment, in which a drone delivery system that is considered essential in the delivery of COVID-19 sample tests, package delivery services from multiple post offices, an inspection of the railway infrastructure and fire-surveillance tasks. Moreover, the prediction model also considers the impacts of other significant factors, including emergency UTM operations, static no-fly zones (NFZs), and variations in weather conditions. The results show that the proposed model achieves the smallest RMSE value in all scenarios compared to other approaches. Specifically, the prediction error of the proposed model is 8.34% lower than the shallow neural network (on average) and 19.87% lower than the regression model on average.

Current airspace has limited resources, and the widespread use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) increases airspace density, which is already crowded with manned aircraft. This demands the improvement of airspace safety and capacity while considering all parametric uncertainties that may hinder aircraft and UAV mobility such as dynamic airspace structures and weather conditions. This paper proposes a data analytics framework to characterize traffic flow patterns of unmanned traffic management (UTM) airspace by analyzing simulated historical data. Mission patterns are characterized and identified by considering multiple UAV missions and scenarios with different priority levels to highlight UAVs’ trajectories and deviations from the actual path due to these constraints. The pertinent data analysis supports risk analysis and improves trajectory planning in different airspace regions considering all dynamic parameters such as extreme weather, emergency services, and dynamic airspace structures. The data processing framework, which is density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN), identified significant deviations in mission patterns with almost 82% confidence level. The UTM traffic flow characterization is conducted by three key characterization parameters mainly Distance from Centroid (DFC), Distance to Complete Mission (DTCM) and Time to Complete Mission (TTCM). This work also analyzed the airspace congestion using the Kernel density estimation (KDE). This analysis identified some regions of interference as potential congested areas representing safety concerns. The proposed framework is envisioned to assist UTM authority by characterizing air traffic behavior, managing its flow, improving airspace design, and providing the basis for developing predictive capabilities that support traffic flow management.