This study presents a high-fidelity digital twin (DT) framework designed to evaluate and improve vertiport operations for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM). By integrating Unreal Engine, AirSim, and Cesium, the framework enables real-time simulation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), including unmanned electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) operations under nominal and disrupted conditions, such as adverse weather and engine failures. The DT supports interactive visualisation and risk-free analysis of decision-making protocols, vertiport layouts, and UAV handling strategies across multi-scenarios. To validate system realism, mixed-reality experiments involving physical UAVs, acting as surrogates for eVTOL platforms, demonstrate consistency between simulations and real-world flight behaviours. These UAV-based tests confirm the applicability of the DT environment to AAM. Intelligent algorithms detect Final Approach and Take-Off (FATO) areas and adjust flight paths for seamless take-off and landing. Live environmental data are incorporated for dynamic risk assessment and operational adjustment. A structured capacity evaluation method is proposed, modelling constraints including turnaround time, infrastructure limits, charging requirements, and emergency delays. Mitigation strategies, such as ultra-fast charging and reconfiguring the layout, are introduced to restore throughput. This DT provides a scalable, drone-integrated, and data-driven foundation for vertiport optimisation and regulatory planning, supporting safe and resilient integration into the AAM ecosystem.

Accurate prediction of drone motion within structured urban air corridors is essential for ensuring safe and efficient operations in Urban Air Mobility (UAM) systems. Although real-world Remote Identification (Remote ID) regulations require drones to broadcast critical flight information such as velocity, access to large-scale, high-quality broadcast data remains limited. To address this, this study leverages a Digital Twin (DT) framework to augment Remote ID spatio-temporal broadcasts, emulating the sensing environment of dense urban airspace. Using Remote ID data, we propose BiDGCNLLM, a hybrid prediction framework that integrates a Bidirectional Graph Convolutional Network (BiGCN) with Dynamic Edge Weighting and a reprogrammed Large Language Model (LLM, Qwen2.5–0.5B) to capture spatial dependencies and temporal patterns in drone speed trajectories. The model forecasts near-future speed variations in surrounding drones, supporting proactive conflict avoidance in constrained air corridors. Results from the AirSUMO co-simulation platform and a DT replica of the Cranfield University campus show that BiDGCNLLM outperforms state-of-the-art time series models in short-term velocity prediction. Compared to Transformer-LSTM, BiDGCNLLM marginally improves the $R^2$ by 11.59%. This study introduces the integration of LLMs into dynamic graph-based drone prediction. It shows the potential of Remote ID broadcasts to enable scalable, real-time airspace safety solutions in UAM.

Removing noise from health signals is critical in gas path diagnostics of aircraft engines. An efficient noise filtering/denoising method should remove noise without using future data points, preserve important changes, and promote accurate diagnostics without time delay. Machine learning (ML)-based methods are promising for high fidelity, accuracy, and computational efficiency under the motivation of Intelligent Engines. However, previous ML-based denoising methods are rarely applied in actual engineering practice because they cannot accommodate time series and cannot effectively capture important changes or are limited by the time delay problem. This paper proposes a convolutional neural network denoising auto-encoder (CNN-DAE) method to build a denoising auto-encoder structure. In this structure, a convolutional operation is used to accommodate time series, and causal convolution is introduced to solve the problem of using future data points. The proposed denoising method is evaluated against NASA's propulsion diagnostic method evaluation strategy (prodimes) software. It has been proved that the proposed method can accommodate time series, remove noise for improved denoising accuracy, and preserve the important changes for enhanced diagnostic information. NASA's blind test case results show that kappa coefficient of a common diagnostic method using the processed data is 0.731 and is at least 0.046 higher than the other diagnostic methods in the open literature. Processing health signals using the proposed method would significantly promote accurate diagnostics without time delay. The proposed method could support intelligent condition monitoring systems by exploiting historical information for improved denoising and diagnostic performance.